Rocky Mountain AIAA Names Lisa Hardaway Engineer of the Year

The Rocky Mountain Section (RMS) of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) has named Lisa Hardaway, of Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Engineer of the Year for 2015 to 2016.

"We chose Lisa as the 2016 RMS Engineer of the Year based on the wide-ranging impact her work on the Ralph program had on the aerospace industry at large," said Rusty Powell, honors and awards chair for the AIAA RMS. "We also considered her mentorship of women undergraduates in aerospace engineering."

Hardaway was Ball's program manager for the company's Ralph instrument aboard NASA's New Horizons mission. The spacecraft completed a flyby of Pluto in July 2015, during which Ball's Ralph camera returned the closest images ever seen of the dwarf planet.

Because the journey to Pluto would take nearly 10 years, the Ball team working under Hardaway was tasked with building a very small, extremely lightweight camera that required minimal power. New Horizons traveled more than 3 billion miles to come within 7400 miles of Pluto. The spacecraft continues to provide scientists with images that reveal Pluto's landscape as it makes it way through the Kuiper belt.

Hardaway joined Ball Aerospace in 1995 and played a significant role in Ball's work for the Hubble Space Telescope, including the Wide Field Camera 3, the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. She was also instrumental on Ball's Deep Impact mission and the company's star tracker program.