The Women In The Blue Shirts Who Dare Mighty Things

From Forbes:  The Women In The Blue Shirts Who Dare Mighty Things

On August 5th eyes diverted away from the delayed Olympic feeds to follow NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Control Room’s live stream. The ‘Blue Shirts’ shared their emotions with the world as they bit their nails during the 7 Minutes of Terror and finally when the first thumbnail was sent from the Mars Curiosity Rover all the way from the red planet.

There were a few women scattered amongst the blue shirts in the control room and I tweeted asking who they were. After a bunch of RTs and replies with ideas, Priscilla Vega (@PR_Vega), science writer and press officer for JPL, came through for us with a list. Rachel Sklar posted the list on her blog Change The Ratio which you should definitely read.

There were six members of the JPL team in the control room [who were women] for the launch. In no particular order, they were:

• Pauline Hwang, Deputy Integrated Planning & Execution Team Chief
• Erisa Hines, Attitude Control System Engineer
• Ann Devereaux, EDL Flight System Engineer
• Kelly Clarke, Deputy Realtime Operations Team Chief/GDS Engineer
• Leslie Livesay, Director for the Engineering and Science Directorate
• Nagin Cox, Assistant Flight System System Engineering Manager

My pal @mightmendoza also found @jec2mars, who is part of the Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) Team.
I also want to call out that the meme filled tweets from @MarsCuriosity are written by  Veronica McGregor, Courtney O’Connor and Stephanie Smith. Well done!
Let these ladies know that we appreciate their hard work and that we noticed them behind the starry mohawk!