Janet Barth has spent most of her career at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, placing her at the center of some of NASA’s most exciting projects in the past 40 years.

She joined the center as a cooperative student and retired in 2014 from her position as head of the electrical department. She has had a hand in servicing the Hubble Space Telescope missions, launching the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Magnetosphere Multiscale Mission, and developing the James Webb Space Telescope.


Barth, an IEEE Life Fellow, has done pioneering work analyzing the effects of cosmic rays and solar radiation on space observatories. Its tools and methods are still used today. She also helped develop the scientific requirements for NASA’s Life with a Star program, which studies the sun, magnetosphere, and planetary systems.

For her work, Barth was awarded this year’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie IEEE Award for “leadership and contributions to the design, construction, deployment and operation of efficient, reliable space systems.”

“I still cry just thinking about it,” says Bart. “Receiving this award is humiliating. Everyone at IEEE and Goddard that I’ve worked with has received a portion of this award.”

From Cooperative Recruitment to Head of NASA EE Division

Bart first attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to earn a degree in biology, but soon realized it wasn’t for her. She transferred to the University of Maryland at College Park and changed her major to applied mathematics.

She was hired as a co-op in 1978 in downtown Goddard, which is about 9 kilometers from the university. Cooperative work allows students to work for a company and gain experience while earning their degree.

“I was excited to use my analytical and mathematical skills to make new scientific research possible at Goddard,” she says. She conducted research on the radiation environment and its effects on electronic systems.

Goddard hired her after she received her degree in radiation and hardness engineering. It helped ensure that electronics and materials in space systems work properly after being exposed to radiation in space.

Because of her expertise in space radiation, George Whitbrough, director of NASA’s Solar-Terrestrial Physics Program (now its Heliophysics Division), asked her in 1999 to help write a funding proposal for a program he wanted to launch, which became known as Life with Star. It received US$2 billion from the US Congress and was launched in 2001.

In her 12 years with the program, Barth helped write an architecture paper that she says has become a seminal publication in the field of heliophysics (the study of the sun and its effect on space). The document sets out the goals and objectives of the program.

In 2001, she was selected to lead a NASA testbed project that aimed to understand how the environment affects spacecraft. The test bed, which collected data from space to predict how radiation could affect NASA missions, successfully completed its mission in 2020.

Bart reached the next rung in her career in 2002 when she became one of Goddard’s first female deputy heads of engineering. At the Space Center’s Flight Data Systems and Radiation Effects Division, she led a team of engineers who designed on-board computers and data storage systems. While it was a steep learning curve for her, she said she enjoyed it. Three years later, she headed the branch.

In 2010, she received another promotion to head of the electrical department. As the first female director of the Goddard Engineering Department, she led a team of 270 employees who designed, built, and tested electronic and electrical systems for NASA’s instruments and spacecraft.

vintage photograph of a woman smiling in a group of 3Bart (left) and Moira Stanton at the 1997 RADiation and its Effects on Components and Systems conference held in Cannes, France. Bart and Stanton co-designed the poster and won the Outstanding Poster Award.Janet Bart

Work on the James Webb Space Telescope.

Throughout her career, Bart has been involved in the development of the Webb Space Telescope. Whenever she thought she was done with a massive project, she says with a laugh, her path “crossed paths with Webb again.”

She first encountered the Webb project in the late 1990s when she was asked to be part of the telescope’s original research team.

She wrote her space specification. However, after they were published in 1998, the team realized that there were several difficult problems to solve with the telescope’s detectors. Goddard’s team supported Matt Greenhouse, John C. Mather, and other engineers on difficult issues. Greenhouse is the scientist of the Telescope Science Instrument Payload Project. Mather received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries supporting the Big Bang model.

Webb detectors absorb photons – the light from distant galaxies, stars and planets – and convert them into electronic voltages. Bart and her team worked with Greenhouse and Mather to make sure the detectors would work when exposed to the radiation environment at the L2 Lagrange point, one of the locations in space where human-sent objects tend to stay put.

Years later, when Barth headed the Flight Data Systems and Radiation Effects Department, she oversaw the development of the telescope’s instrument control and data processing systems. Because of her important role, Bart’s name was written on the flight box of the ICDH telescope.

When she became head of Goddard’s electrical engineering department, she was assigned to the telescope’s technical inspection team.

“At that point,” she says, “we focused on the mechanics of deployment and the risks of not being able to fully test it in the environment where it will be launched and deployed.”

She worked in this group until she retired. In 2019, five years after her retirement, she joined the advisory board of Miller Engineering and Research Corp. Based in Pasadena, Maryland, the company manufactures parts for aerospace and aviation organizations.

“I really like the ethics of the company. They serve science missions and crewed missions,” says Bart. “I went back to my roots and it was really rewarding.”

The Best of IEEE Membership

Bart and her husband Douglas, who is also an engineer, joined the IEEE in 1989. She says they enjoy being part of a “unique peer group”. She particularly enjoys attending IEEE conferences, having access to journals, and attending continuing education courses and seminars, she says.

“I am always up to date with advances in science and technology,” she says, “and attending conferences inspires and motivates me to do what I do.” She adds that the networking opportunities are “amazing” and she’s been able to meet people from virtually every branch of engineering.

An active IEEE volunteer for over 20 years, she is the Executive Chair of the IEEE Society for Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Radiation Effects Steering Group and in 2013-2014 she was President of the IEEE Society for Nuclear and Plasma Sciences. She is also an Associate Editor of the magazine. IEEE Nuclear Science Transactions.

“IEEE has definitely helped my career,” she says. “There is no doubt about that.