Dr. Lisa Hardaway was chief engineer on the Orion Program at Ball Aerospace and Technologies, overseeing the design, development and test of a suite of sensors used for relative navigation. Prior to this, she was the technical manager for the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and the Ralph camera on the New Horizons mission to Pluto.
Through her PhD thesis work at CU Boulder, Hardaway observed, for the first time, several different phenomena that lead to the instability of structures under nanometer deformation.
NASA’s New Horizons mission team honored Hardaway’s life and contributions by dedicating the spectrometer she helped to develop—which led to the first color close-up images of Pluto—in her memory.
Hardaway mentored many young engineers, many CU students and now permanent Ball employees, with a mission to see others succeed and to see CU Boulder succeed.
Hardaway passed away in January 2017.