Lisa Hardaway

Lisa Hardaway
Nationality	American
Engineering career
Discipline	Aerospace Engineering
Institutions	Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of Colorado
Employer(s)	Ball Aerospace
Projects	New Horizons

Lisa Hardaway (1966–2017) was an American aerospace engineer and program manager for an instrument on the New Horizons spacecraft to Pluto and Beyond. Among her awards, she was named Engineer of the Year for 2015–2016 by the Colorado American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.[1]

Life

Hardaway graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University,[2] and University of Colorado. She worked for Ball Aerospace. She was program manager for RALPH, on the New Horizons mission. She is survived by her husband, James, and two children. [3]

In the summer of 2017, NASA renamed the LEISA spectrometer on New Horizons to be the Lisa Hardaway Infrared Mapping Spectrometer in her honor.[4]

Lisa made incredible contributions to New Horizons and our success in exploring Pluto, and we wanted to celebrate those contributions in a special way by dedicating the LEISA spectrometer in her honor

— Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator[4]

Awards and honors

• Lisa Hardaway was named "Engineer of the Year" for 2015–2016 by Colorado American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.[1]
• Asteroid 161699 Lisahardaway was named in her memory.[5] The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 25 September 2018 (M.P.C. 111801).[6]
• A crater on Pluto, Hardaway Crater, was also named in her honor in 2021.[7]

References

1. "Ball Aerospace's Lisa Hardaway Named Engineer of the Year by Colorado AIAA". www.prnewswire.com (Press release). Retrieved 19 January 2018.
2. "Lisa Hardaway, Ph.D." 3 October 2014. Retrieved 19 January 2018.
3. "Lisa Hardaway, pioneering Ball Aerospace engineer in Boulder, dies at 50". 26 January 2017. Retrieved 19 January 2018.
4. Gipson, Lillian (2017-06-23). "NASA's New Horizons Mission Honors Memory of Engineer Lisa Hardaway". NASA. Retrieved 2018-12-19.
5. "161699 Lisahardaway (2006 HR140)". Minor Planet Center. Retrieved 17 October 2018.
6. "MPC/MPO/MPS Archive". Minor Planet Center. Retrieved 17 October 2018.
7. "Pluto crater named for female engineer who helped bring the planet into focus". New Horizons News Center. Retrieved 14 April 2021.

External links

• https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/gone-in-2017-12-trailblazing-women-in-stem/
• https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-camera-behind-the-new-horizons-pluto-photos-ralph/398549/
• https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ball-aerospaces-lisa-hardaway-honored-for-exceptional-leadership-by-women-in-aerospace-300163309.html
• https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-new-horizons-mission-honors-memory-of-engineer-lisa-hardaway