Caltech Mourns the Passing of Arden Albee

Arden L. Albee, professor of geology and planetary science, emeritus, and chief scientist at JPL, passed away March 19, 2025. He was 96. Albee conducted petrological investigations in the United States and Greenland, and eventually of material from the Moon and Mars.

Albee was born and raised in Michigan, the son of two school teachers. He began collecting rocks at a young age, a hobby he was able to develop via family trips through the Dakotas and Montana, Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, and into Canada.

He spent his undergraduate and graduate years at Harvard, beginning with no clear intention of where his education would take him. "I thought of being a lawyer," Albee recalled in a 2017 oral history interview. "I don't know why; I didn't know any lawyers." Instead, Albee majored in geology. "I saw that everybody else was not planning to get something out of their four years that they could make into a career. They were all going to business school or law school or med school, etc. And I couldn't see how I was going to afford to do anything like that. Yes, I liked geology—the introductory course was very, very good. But I think I made that decision because I knew that when I got out in four years, I would be able to get a job," Albee said.

Nevertheless, after earning his undergraduate degree in 1950, Albee stayed on at Harvard to earn a master's degree in 1951. He then did field work for the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in Vermont. As he recalled in his oral history, after three or four years, Albee saw a clipping in the Sunday New York Times about a National Science Foundation (NSF) scholarship. He applied, won, and returned to Harvard to pursue a PhD in geology, which he earned in 1957.

Albee's thesis work was based on his USGS work in Vermont, but before completing his doctoral degree, Albee was already back at work with the USGS in Colorado and then in Maine, searching for uranium, zinc, and other elements that had industrial or military applications.

He was recruited to Caltech in 1959 to serve as a visiting assistant professor, filling in for another geologist who was on sabbatical. He was eventually invited to stay, this time as an associate professor of geology. He became a full professor in 1966, and professor of geology and planetary science in 1999, in recognition of his geological research beyond planet Earth.

Albee's research focus remained petrology. In his early days, he painstakingly identified the minerals in rocks by cutting thin sections and examining them under the microscope, as was the normal methodology at the time. Later, he collaborated with colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is managed by Caltech, to obtain an electron microprobe, a device that uses an electron beam and X-ray diffractometers to search for minerals in rocks. The first electron microprobes could measure only three elements at a time each day, and the information was recorded on computer punch-paper tapes and eventually on punch cards. Identifying minerals in rocks—which he obtained from sites such as Death Valley and Greenland—was a time-consuming process until the invention of a new electron microprobe in 1971 that enabled geologists like Albee to assess the minerals in a sample in the field in mere minutes.

This experience with developing petrological technology led NASA to recruit Albee to work on lunar samples, beginning with those retrieved by the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. He identified the mineral content and structural features of these Moon rocks, and inspected them for evidence of ancient meteorite particles. What Albee found, among other discoveries, was that the Moon rocks were older than any that had yet been identified on Earth. As the Apollo missions ended and the Viking Mars missions began in the mid-1970s, Albee worked on remote-sensing instrumentation that could analyze Martian rocks from the vantage point of an orbiting spacecraft.

In 1979, Albee relocated to JPL to serve as chief scientist, a position he held until 1984. In his oral history interview, he recalled that JPL had a "totally different atmosphere" from Caltech. "The first thing I found out was that if I made a casual remark, somebody went off and tried to do something about it."

At JPL, Albee gained experience in administration; he sat on numerous committees and wrote JPL's annual report. He also helped oversee a digital revolution in spacecraft as computers became an integral part of every instrument onboard; previously, the instrumentation was tied to a single computer associated with the spacecraft itself. During this time as well, JPL developed prototypes of crafts that might someday navigate the surface of Mars.

When Albee returned to his faculty duties on campus in 1984, he continued to work on Mars missions. In his 2017 oral history, he noted that, "Even today, we still know the surface of Mars topography better than we know Earth," mainly because Mars lacks Earth's oceans, which complicate studies of our planet's surface.

Upon his return to campus, he also took on the role of dean of graduate studies, a position he held for the next 16 years. As graduate dean, Albee worked to unify practices across Caltech's divisions, which were significantly different from one another at the time of his return. He was particularly active in recruiting diverse graduate students, something that peer institutions were already doing at the time Albee became dean. Albee responded to the influx of non-US graduate school applicants by instituting interviews with applicants and serving on the graduate study boards for the GRE (Graduate Record Exam) and TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) exams. He also oversaw a significant rise in female graduate school applicants.

While tackling these various roles for Caltech and JPL, Albee was still teaching a full load of classes in petrology and the various microscopic techniques needed to study rocks. For two decades, Albee taught a remote-sensing course over Caltech's spring break, taking 12 to 15 students out to the California desert to see where JPL had been testing its instruments for many years.

He also served on the house committee for the Athenaeum, Caltech's faculty club, and, at times, as the Athenaeum's executive manager while the committee sought new managers. The last time Albee served as executive manager was after his retirement from Caltech in 2002, when he worked to ensure that the Athenaeum was complying with California labor laws and fully supporting itself without an institutional subsidy. "I have some fondness for management," Albee said in 2017. "I want to make things work, figure out how to make people work with me, and so on, and that shows up in all the things I've done." In fact, after Albee retired from Caltech, when he "didn't have anything to do," he became business manager for Westminster Presbyterian Church in Pasadena.

Albee was predeceased by his wife Charleen and son Jamie, and is survived by three children, Janet, Carol, and Mary, and four stepchildren, Margaret, Kathy, Ginger, and George.