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Christine Edwards Stewart is an aerospace engineer at Lockheed Martin. She works in the Denver mission control room for Mars Odyssey, a spacecraft that maps the surface of Mars. Also, she was a mission controller for the launch of the Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft and the comet flyby of the Stardust spacecraft. Recently, she has been developing how people can be immersed in a 3-D virtual-reality environment to learn how to build and fly spacecraft. Previously, she worked with NASA engineers and astronauts in Houston on the computer-brains of the Orion spaceship. In the future, the Orion will replace the Space Shuttle and fly astronauts on missions to asteroids.
Christine developed a passion for science and space exploration while growing up in Denver, Colorado, where she enjoyed hiking, launching rockets, and traveling on road-trips to airplane museums with her family. Now, she likes to sing in choirs, dance, and has been taking geology classes at the local museum. For college, she attended MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated in 2008 with Bachelor and Master of Science Degrees in Aerospace Engineering. While at MIT, she helped teach classes as a Graduate Teaching Fellow and worked on the SPHERES miniature satellites. Originally inspired by the floating robot that shoots lasers at Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, SPHERES are basketball-sized robots that float around inside the International Space Station. Ms. Stewart worked with the space-station astronauts to perform experiments with SPHERES. During the college breaks, she was an intern for Lockheed Martin and NASA. While she was on the Atlas Launch Vehicle team in Denver, Colorado, she did computer programming for the rocket simulations. At Kennedy Space Center in Florida, she studied Space Shuttle operations.
Another of Christine's passions is teaching and community outreach. She enjoys organizing workshops and giving presentations. She loves telling the stories of the spacecraft that have explored our solar system, including their challenges and their discoveries. Also, she has organized and led learning activities for groups of students, including launching water rockets, making Mars rovers, building and flying remote-control airplanes, making slime, and creating candy spaceships. For two years, she managed the Science Projects program at the MIT Public Service Center. In this program, underprivileged eighth and ninth graders designed and developed science projects. For the future, She looks forward to continuing her contributions to the exploration of the solar system and inspiring the next generation of space explorers.
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