Judith Resnik, American colonel, engineer, and astronaut (b. 1949)
Judith Arlene Resnik (April 5, 1949 – January 28, 1986) was an American electrical engineer, software engineer, biomedical engineer, pilot and NASA astronaut who died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger during the launch of mission STS-51-L. Resnik was the fourth woman, the second American woman, and the first Jewish woman of any nationality to fly in space, logging 145 hours in orbit. Her first space flight was the STS-41-D mission in August and September 1984, when her duties included operating the Space Shuttle's robotic arm.
Recognized while still a child for her "intellectual brilliance", Resnik was accepted at Carnegie Mellon University after being one of only sixteen women in the history of the United States to have attained a perfect score on the SAT exam at the time. She went on to graduate with a degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon before attaining a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland. Resnik went on to work for RCA as an engineer on Navy missile and radar projects, was a senior systems engineer for Xerox Corporation and published research on special-purpose integrated circuitry before she was recruited by NASA to the astronaut program as a mission specialist at age 28. While training on the astronaut program, she developed software and operating procedures for NASA missions. She was also a pilot and made research contributions to biomedical engineering as a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health.