Sue Finley, 80, has worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge for over 50 years. She was first employed in 1958 as a “laptop,” an employee who calculated mathematical equations by hand, including rocket or spacecraft trajectories. She has labored on some of the initiatives at some point in her professions, such as the Venus Balloon Project, Mars Exploration Rover missions, and the Juno project. Today, she is a subsystem and takes a look at engineers for NASA’s Deep Space Network.
A knack for numbers
Finley was born in downtown Los Angeles and later moved to her circle of relatives in Fresno at age 6. She returned to Southern California to wait for Scripps College in Claremont and intended to research art. But Finley left college earlier than her final year after figuring out that “you may examine artwork” and that she wouldn’t be able to do a senior thesis at the challenge.
She decided she couldn’t waste her mom’s money and scanned newspaper commercials for jobs. Finley ultimately got here through a gap for a document clerk at aircraft maker Convair in Pomona. She took a typing check and instructed the following day that the placement had already been filled. But Finley was asked if she preferred numbers. “I said, ‘Oh, I love numbers, much better than letters,’ ” she stated. “So they placed me to work as a laptop.”
Closer shuttle
Finley used a Frieden calculator — a typewriter-sized digital gadget — to clear up equations for the engineers in Convair’s thermodynamics segment for about a year. She got married in 1957 and moved to San Gabriel. During one particularly foggy go back and forth to Pomona, she determined that getting a job towards domestic might be higher. Her husband, a latest Caltech grad, advised that she inquire about the university’s lab at the top of the Arroyo — the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which became then subsidized by the U.S. Army. NASA had no longer yet been set up. JPL wanted a laptop, and Finley changed into hiring. Three days later, the U.S. Space program took a giant star forward byby launching its first satellite T.V. for PC, Explorer 1, which was designed, built, and operated using JPL.
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“What I consider become this wonderful large sheet cake that all of us were given,” Finley stated. “And there weren’t that many people working at JPL [at the time] that they may use just one sheet cake.”
Programming revel in
Finley worked at JPL for 2½ years until she and her husband moved to Riverside to attend graduate college at the U.C. Jobs was scarce during the recession of 1960 to 1961, so a posting on a university bulletin board caught her eye: a free weeklong course in Fortran programming.
After her husband finished his master’s application, they moved to Pasadena, and Finley returned to JPL in 1962, armed with her new know-how. She was one of only a few humans at the lab who knew Fortran. Today, one of the applications that Finley wrote to assist in navigating spacecraft remains being used at JPL, even though with a bit of an upgrade. Oh, I love numbers, a good deal higher than letters. Sue Finley Camaraderie at JPL.
Finley left JPL once more in 1963 to take care of her two sons, but again six years later for proper. By her 1/3 flip, more girls were in the lab, and the human computers had largely transitioned into roles as laptop programmers. The ladies cast near ties, and Finley stated they were all “excellent buddies, and still are.” By the Nineteen Seventies, the girls who had been computer systems had left their separate all-girl workplace and were incorporated into diverse mission groups. “The men usually, from the very starting, treated us as equals,” Finley said. “We had been doing something they couldn’t do, and they had to cross ahead with what they have been doing.”
Most memorable venture
In 1980, Finley started working on NASA’s Deep Space Network, a device of massive radio antennas around the sector that connects with spacecraft on interplanetary missions and some spacecraft that orbit Earth.
One of these missions changed into the Venus Balloon Project, throughout which two Russian space probes, on their way to Halley’s Comet, deployed two balloons into Venus’ environment in 1985 to acquire facts about the environment. Although the assignment was a joint Soviet-French project, the JPL-operated DSN was tracking the spacecraft because it was recognized. Finley was accountable for writing a program that computerized movement commands for a DSN antenna. The antenna must be pointed exactly at the spacecraft to acquire any facts. “I can not forget when we saw the first sign inside the darkroom; I jumped up and down because I became so satisfied,” Finley stated.
Tuning up
Finley helped layout the tones — special units of radio frequencies emitted by using a spacecraft corresponding to moves taken, such as a valve establishing — for the Juno challenge, which entered Jupiter’s orbit last year. NASA depended on the tones to get actual-time reputation updates on Juno, while the spacecraft changed to a point far away from the Earth, and it could not send normal telemetry because the signal was too weak. “That turned into virtually a laugh,” Finley stated.
Current work
Today, Finley is assisting in designing and looking at a new pizza field-sized receiver for the DSN. She is also working on a concept allowing small satellites to transmit statistics by intercepting the beam of a bigger spacecraft’s antenna. She has no plans to retire. “I love coming to paintings,” Finley stated. “You analyze something new each day.”
Personal
Finley lives in Arcadia and likes going to the symphony and ballet and performing in the theater. She additionally enjoys traveling with her four grandchildren, who live in St. Louis and Andover, Mass.
