Mary L. Romelfanger
Mary Romelfanger is the system manager for the
Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT)
Project in the
Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at
The Johns Hopkins University .
EDUCATION
After graduating in May of 1982 from Thoreau High School in
Thoreau, New Mexico,
Mary accepted an appointment to the
United States Naval Academy
in Annapolis, Maryland.
She survived plebe summer and made it through the first semester.
Mary then spent a semester taking courses at the University of
New Mexico at Gallup and through the
Navajo Community College.
She then attended the
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
in Socorro,
New Mexico for a year.
Mary finally received her B.S. in May of 1986 from
Towson State University in Towson,
Maryland. This degree was a double major in Computer Science and
Mathematics.
Mary joined the HUT team as a Scientific Programmer in August of 1988.
She wrote and maintained several pieces of software for the mission planning
phase of the astro-1 mission.
By the summer of 1989, she had been asked to
learn some of the computer system management tasks, and by the summer of
1990 she took the job as HUT System Manager. She provided system management,
software support, data flow monitoring and data archiving support for the
HUT team
at the Payload Operations Command Center(POCC) in Huntsville, Alabama
during the Astro-1 space shuttle flight. During this time,
she also participated in the
development and maintenance of a set of software for post-flight data
processing. Specifically, she produced the software to read the binary
encoded data tapes provided by NASA after the flight. She also worked on the
definition and coding required to produce a database of the engineering
data gathered. The final products of this
processing have been used in-house and delivered to the
National Space Science Data Center for public access
(HUT data is not on-line yet).
Mary was able to continue on with the
Astro-2 HUT team and participated in the
Astro-2 flight as well.
Before the flight, she was responsible for several
computer hardware upgrades, as well as the software ports for the real-time
ground support software associated with those hardware changes.
She was also
responsible for shipping and setting up the computer equipment needed
for the preflight testing and calibration of hut, and for setting up the
HUT area in the POCC for the realtime ground support. During the
flight, Mary processed and created the data sets that were uplinked to HUT
in preparation for the next shift of observations. Mary is currently
providing system and software support for the astronomers as they begin
the data processing phase. She is also porting the postflight software
mentioned above to the upgraded computers.
Mary has also occasionally provided system management support for the FOS
team at JHU.
Personal
Mary was born Mary Lucille McNeill on December 30, 1964 in
Albuquerque,
New Mexico.
Yes, that does make her a citizen of the United States and English is her
native language. Mary was raised in Thoreau, New Mexico, which is exactly
in the middle between Gallup and Grants
(map) about 100 miles
west of Albuquerque on the edge of the Navajo Reservation.
Karen M. Strom has produced a very interesting html document describing a trip
through that part of the country. It is called
Voyage to Another
Universe --- 1994, and it includes descriptions, pictures and audio files.
Mary married in May of 1984. She and her husband,
Fred Romelfanger, have
two children,
Jennifer(7) and
Jonathan(4).
Other sites:
SOFTWARE:
Ghostscript and Ghostview
HTML Converters
Numerical Recipes
HARDWARE:
Apple
IBM
Last updated August 30, 1995
The Astro-2 Personnel List provides information
on the other HUT personnel who are involved with the Astro-2 mission.
HUT Home Page
Mary L. Romelfanger
The Johns Hopkins University
Room 247 Bloomberg Center
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
(410)516-8594 (410)516-8260(FAX)
mary@pha.jhu.edu
ASTRO-1
ASTRO-2