Judith Resnik

Judith Arlene Resnik (Akron, Ohio, April 5, 1949-Cape Canaveral, Florida, January 28, 1986) was a PhD in electrical engineering, software engineer, biomedical engineer, pilot and American astronaut. She was the second American woman in space and the fourth worldwide, reaching 145 hours in orbit. The IEEE "Judith Resnik" Award was named in her honor. She died aboard the space shuttle Challenger when it disintegrated during the launch of the STS-51-L mission.

Judith Resnik was accepted to Carnegie Mellon University as one of 16 women in US history to have earned a perfect score on the SAT up to that point. She graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon and later earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland. Known as a child for being brilliant, she worked for RCA as an engineer on missile and radar projects for the US Navy, was a senior software development engineer for the Xerox corporation, and published research on special-purpose integrated circuits before being recruited to the NASA astronaut program as a mission specialist at the age of 28. While training in the astronaut program, she developed software and operating procedures for NASA missions, she was also a pilot and contributed biomedical engineering research for the US National Institutes of Health.

Biography

The young Judith Resnik

Judith Arlene Resnik was born on April 5, 1949 in Akron, Ohio. She was the daughter of Sara and Marvin Resnik, an optometrist. His father was fluent in eight languages and served in the military in intelligence and aerial reconnaissance during World War II in the Pacific War. Both parents were Jewish immigrants originally from the Ukraine (his father emigrated via Israel). in an observant Jewish home in a family of rabbinical ancestry, studying in Jewish schools every weekend, and celebrated the Bat Mitzva according to their tradition.

Her parents divorced when she was a teenager; in response, she prepared and filed a court case so that her custody could pass from her mother to her father, with whom she was particularly close. She was noted for her "intellectual brilliance" from the time she was in kindergarten and entered school. elementary school a year earlier. She was an outstanding student at Firestone High School in Akron, Ohio, excelling in mathematics, languages, and classical piano. Upon graduation she was the one who gave the Valedictorian speech which is given before the graduates of her class and was runner-up prom queen. Playing the classical piano with "more than technical proficiency", she planned to become a professional concert pianist. When asked about her intensity on the piano, she replied, I never play anything softly. Before college, she earned a perfect score on her SAT, the only woman in the country to do so that year and one of the 16 women who had achieved it so far.

At the age of 17, she entered Carnegie Mellon University, one of three female students studying Electrical Engineering. In her sophomore year at the university, she developed a passion for engineering by discovering her interests in the "practical aspects" of science, attending lectures with her boyfriend and future husband, Michael Oldak, who was also a student in the engineering course. Oldak recalls: She was a math genius, but at some point pure math lost her interest and she wanted something more tangible, so she changed her college major to electrical engineering. She earned her bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1970. His mentor and advisor was the dean of Carnegie Mellon's College of Engineering, Professor Angel G. Jordan. In 1977 he received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering with honors from the University of Maryland.

Career

After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, she worked at RCA as a design engineer on missile and radar projects and won the Graduate Study Program Award. She did circuit design for the surface radar and missile division. During her time with RCA she worked for the US Navy building custom integrated circuits for phased array radar control systems and later developed electronic components and software for NASA's telemetry systems and rocket sounding programs.. An academic paper she wrote on special purpose integrated circuits came to the attention of NASA during this time.

In 1977, he qualified as a professional aviation pilot while completing his doctorate, having achieved near-perfect scores on his flight tests (two 100s and one 98). After joining NASA, he flew the Northrop T-38 Talon. Astronaut Jerome Apt described her as "an excellent pilot and a wonderful operator in space".

While working on her Ph.D., she also served as a biomedical engineering research fellow at the National Institutes of Health Laboratory of Neurophysiology from 1974 to 1977. As a biomedical engineer, she researched the physiology of visual systems. published in 1978 was entitled: "A new fast-scanning microspectrophotometer and its use to measure pathways and kinetics of rhodopsin photoproducts in frog retinas." She was a senior systems engineer for Xerox Corporation in product development at The Second, California.

In January 1978, she was recruited into the NASA Astronaut Corps at age 28, one of six women selected from 8,000 applicants. The program to find female astronauts was developed by actress Nichelle Nichols, who she volunteered her time. Her mentor and adviser, Professor Angel G. Jordan, then dean of and later provost of the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon, encouraged Resnik to apply for the program. Jordan later claimed to feel somewhat responsible for her loss, saying 25 years after the Challenger disaster: She was an incredible person […] I pushed her to excel and I live with that memory every day.

When she joined the NASA astronaut program, she trained intensely and with great determination, focusing particularly on her fitness. She was deeply disappointed when she didn't become the first American woman in space. During training, it was assumed that either she or Sally Ride would become the first woman in space, since they were the only trainees to receive "the kind of technical assignments that really prepared them for flight," such as RMS work and CAPCOM tasks. His first spaceflight was on the maiden voyage of the shuttle Discovery on mission STS-41-D from August to September 1984 as a mission specialist. Her duties included operating the shuttle's robotic arm, which she helped create and in which she was an expert. She deployed and experimented on a solar panel array as a potential future way to generate additional electrical power during space missions. After performing numerous dynamic tests, he concluded that the experiment performed very well and was in agreement with ground-based simulations of the array. He advocated the benefits of solar panel technology, particularly for its future use in powering space stations.

During the mission, Resnik held up a handwritten sign saying "Hello Dad" to the cameras, and in a live televised broadcast from space with President Reagan told him: Earth looks great. Asked by Reagan if the flight was all she had hoped for, she replied, It certainly is and I couldn't have picked a better crew to fly with. Fellow astronaut Henry Hartsfield described her as the i>astronaut's astronaut after the mission, while fellow colleague Mike Mullane wrote: I was also happy to be on the crew with Judy [...] She was smart, hard-working and dependable, all things What would you want in a crewmate.

While undergoing the intensive training of NASA's astronaut program, Resnik worked on orbital systems principle research, flight software, and the development of spacecraft manual control systems. He developed the software and operating procedures for the Remote Manipulation System; in addition to the deployment systems software for the tethered satellite system, as well as worked on orbiter development and created other experimental software for use on future missions.

She was the second American woman in space, after Sally Ride, and fourth overall.

Challenger Disaster

Dr. Resnik was a mission specialist aboard the shuttle Challenger for flight STS-51-L. The last words of her recorded from her aboard the Challenger referred to the "LVLH" (Vertical Low/Horizontal Low) scan, reminding the cabin crew of a switch setting change.

Following the Challenger disaster, examination of the salvaged vehicle's cockpit revealed that three of the crew member's Personal Exit Air Packs (PEAP) were activated: those of Resnik, the mission officer Ellison Onizuka and pilot Michael J. Smith. The location of Smith's activation switch on the back of his seat means that Resnik or Onizuka most likely activated it for him. Mike Mullane writes:

Mike Smith's PEAP had been activated by either Judy or El, I wondered if I would have had the presence of mind to do the same if I had been in the Challenger cockpit. Or would I have been locked in a catatonic paralysis of fear? There was nothing in our training about activating a PEAP in the event of an in-flight emergency. The fact that Judy or El did it for Mike Smith makes them heroic in my mind. They had been able to block out the terrifying sights, sounds and movements of the Challenger's destruction and had reached that switch. It was the kind of thing a real astronaut would do: keep calm in the most difficult circumstances.

This is the only available evidence showing that Onizuka and Resnik were alive after the cab separated from the vehicle. Had the cabin lost pressure at the time of the explosion, the airpacks alone would not have sustained the crew during the two-minute descent into the Atlantic Ocean. Resnik's was the first body recovered from the vehicle's cabin. crashed by Navy divers from the USS Preserver.

Personal life

In 1970, she married Michael Oldak, a fellow engineering student at Carnegie Mellon. They divorced in 1975 but remained on good terms to the point that Oldak was invited by Judith to launch her first voyage into space on the shuttle Discovery in August 1984. While in college, she was a member of the Tau fraternity. Beta Pi and Alpha Epsilon Phi. She was also a gourmet cook and co-driver in rally car races, in which she participated many times with her then boyfriend.At the time of her death she was survived by her parents and her brother Charles Resnik who He is a radiologist. Her remains rest in Arlington National Cemetery.

Legacy

Resnik has been awarded numerous posthumous honors and honored with monuments and buildings named after her, including a Resnik lunar crater located within the Apollo impact basin on the far side of the Moon.

The asteroid (3356) Resnik also commemorates his name. A bedroom at his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon; the main engineering lecture hall of the University of Maryland; Judith A. Resnik Elementary School in Gaithersburg, Maryland; Judith Resnik Community Learning Center in her hometown of Akron, Ohio; and Judith A. Resnik Middle School, established in 2016, in San Antonio, Texas. A memorial to her and the rest of the Challenger crew was dedicated in Seabrook, Texas, where Resnik lived while at the Johnson Space Center.

The IEEE Judith A. Resnik Award was established in 1986 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and is awarded annually to an individual or team in recognition of outstanding contributions to space engineering in areas of relevance to the IEEE.

The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) annually awards the Resnik Challenger Medal to a woman who has changed the space industry, for having created milestones in the development of space technology and for serving as a resource for the entire society. humanity.

The Challenger Center was established in 1986 by Judith's brother, Charles Resnik MD, in honor of the crew members. The goal of the center is to increase children's interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

On February 23, 1990, Resnik was named one of ten finalists to represent Ohio in National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.

He appears in the Netflix series Challenger: The Final Flight, as one of the seven crew members aboard the fatal shuttle flight.

Jenna Resnik quotes a phrase from her Aunt Judith in her article for the Challenger Foundation website: It is very important that you realize that the people you consider to be heroes are actually very similar to you. Only hard work and perseverance will help you succeed in any undertaking; there is no magic in being more 'special' than someone else.