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Janet Barth spent most of her profession on the Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md.—which put her in the midst of a few of NASA’s most fun tasks of the previous 40 years.
She joined the middle as a co-op scholar and retired in 2014 as chief of its electrical engineering division. She had a hand in Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions, launching the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, and creating the James Webb Space Telescope.
Barth, an IEEE Life Fellow, performed pioneering work in analyzing the consequences of cosmic rays and photo voltaic radiation on spacecraft observatories. Her instruments and strategies are nonetheless used in the present day. She additionally helped develop science necessities for NASA’s Living With a Star program, which research the solar, magnetospheres, and planetary programs.
For her work, Barth was honored with this yr’s IEEE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award for “leadership of and contributions to the advancement of the design, building, deployment, and operation of capable, robust space systems.”
“I still tear up just thinking about it,” Barth says. “Receiving this award is humbling. Everyone at IEEE and Goddard who I worked with owns a piece of this award.”
From co-op rent to chief of NASA’s EE division
Barth initially attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, to pursue a level in biology, however she quickly realized that it wasn’t a superb match for her. She transferred to the University of Maryland in College Park, and altered her main to utilized arithmetic.
She was accepted for a co-op place in 1978 on the Goddard middle, which is about 9 kilometers from the college. Co-op jobs enable college students to work at an organization and achieve expertise whereas pursuing their diploma.
“I was excited about using my analysis and math skills to enable new science at Goddard,” she says. She performed analysis on radiation environments and their results on digital programs.
Goddard employed her after she graduated as a radiation and hardness assurance engineer. She helped make sure that the electronics and supplies in area programs would carry out as designed after being uncovered to radiation in area.
Because of her experience in area radiation, George Withbroe, director of the NASA Solar-Terrestrial Physics program (now its Heliophysics Division), requested her in 1999 to assist write a funding proposal for a program he needed to launch—which grew to become Living With a Star. It acquired US $2 billion from the U.S. Congress and launched in 2001.
During her 12 years with this system, Barth helped write the structure doc, which she says grew to become a seminal publication for the sphere of heliophysics (the research of the solar and the way it influences area). The doc outlines this system’s objectives and aims.
In 2001 she was chosen to be undertaking supervisor for a NASA check mattress that aimed to know how spacecraft are affected by their setting. The check mattress, which collected knowledge from area to foretell how radiation may influence NASA missions, efficiently accomplished its mission in 2020.
Barth reached the subsequent rung on her profession ladder in 2002, when she grew to become one of many first feminine affiliate department heads of engineering at Goddard. At the area middle’s Flight Data Systems and Radiation Effects Branch, she led a crew of engineers who designed flight computer systems and storage programs. Although it was a steep studying curve for her, she says, she loved it. Three years later, she was heading the department.
She received one other promotion, in 2010, to chief of {the electrical} engineering division. As the Goddard Engineering Directorate’s first feminine division chief, she led a crew of 270 staff who designed, constructed, and examined electronics and electrical programs for NASA devices and spacecraft.
Barth (left) and Moira Stanton on the 1997 RADiation and its Effects on Components and Systems Conference, held in Cannes, France. Barth and Stanton coauthored a poster paper and acquired the excellent poster paper award.Janet Barth
Working on the James Webb Space Telescope
Throughout her profession, Barth was concerned within the growth of the Webb area telescope. Whenever she thought that she was completed with the huge undertaking, she says with fun, her path would “intersect with Webb again.”
She first encountered the Webb undertaking within the late Nineteen Nineties, when she was requested to be on the preliminary research crew for the telescope.
She wrote its space-environment specs. After they had been revealed in 1998, nonetheless, the crew realized that there have been a number of advanced issues to unravel with the telescope’s detectors. The Goddard crew supported Matt Greenhouse, John C. Mather, and different engineers to work on the tough points. Greenhouse is a undertaking scientist for the telescope’s science instrument payload. Mather received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries supporting the Big Bang mannequin.
The Webb’s detectors soak up photons—mild from far-away galaxies, stars, and planets—and convert them into digital voltages. Barth and her crew labored with Greenhouse and Mather to confirm that the detectors would work whereas uncovered to the radiation setting on the L2 Lagrangian level, one of many positions in area the place human-sent objects have a tendency to remain put.
Years later, when Barth was heading the Flight Data Systems and Radiation Effects department, she oversaw the event of the telescope’s instrument command and knowledge dealing with programs. Because of her essential position, Barth’s identify was written on the telescope’s instrument ICDH flight field.
When she grew to become chief of Goddard’s electrical engineering division, she was assigned to the technical evaluate panel for the telescope.
“At that point,” she says, “we focused on the mechanics of deployment and the risks that came with not being able to fully test it in the environment it would be launched and deployed in.”
She served on that panel till she retired. In 2019, 5 years after retiring, she joined the Miller Engineering and Research Corp. advisory board. The firm, primarily based in Pasadena, Md., manufactures components for aerospace and aviation organizations.
“I really like the ethics of the company. They service science missions and crewed missions,” Barth says. “I went back to my roots, and that’s been really rewarding.”
The greatest issues about being an IEEE member
Barth and her husband, Douglas, who can be an engineer, joined IEEE in 1989. She says they get pleasure from belonging to a “unique peer group.” She particularly likes attending IEEE conferences, gaining access to journals, and with the ability to take persevering with schooling programs and workshops, she says.
“I stay up to date on the advancements in science and engineering,” she says, “and going to conferences keeps me inspired and motivated in what I do.” The networking alternatives are “terrific,” she provides, and she or he’s been in a position to meet individuals from nearly all engineering industries.
An lively IEEE volunteer for greater than 20 years, she is government chairwoman of the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society’s Radiation Effects Steering Group, and she or he served as 2013–2014 president of the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society. She is also an affiliate editor for IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science.
“IEEE has definitely benefited my career,” she says. “There’s no doubt about that.”