Space Pioneer Sue Finley ’58 Featured in L.A. Times

(Finley, 80, shown next to a model of the Voyager 1 space probe. She worked on Voyager in the 1970s. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

NASA’s longest serving female employee, Susan Finley, is a Scripps College alum whose pioneering work as a space engineering specialist is featured in a recent Los Angeles Times article. Finley, 80, talks about her five decades-long career at Pasadena-based JPL, where she was first hired in 1958 as a “computer,” an employee who calculated mathematical equations, such as rocket or spacecraft trajectories, by hand. She has worked on a number of projects throughout her career, including the Venus Balloon Project, Mars Exploration Rover missions and the Juno mission. Today, Finley is a subsystem and test engineer for NASA’s Deep Space Network.