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Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:

Mary is the daughter of Charles E. Stanley, St., a WWII Bomber Pilot, and Mary Alice Schmitz. She was born in Buffalo, NY in 1955. She is a graduate of Calasanctius Prep School and has a Bachelors Degree in Mathematics/Computer Science from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. She has two children, Russell and Eileen LeFurgy. Mary is a member of American Mensa, a Bridge Lifemaster and a breast cancer survivor.
In her career, she has done Software Management work for both government and commercial aerospace projects. From 1987-1993, she worked for Grumman Aerospace Company at the Space Station Freedom (renamed the International Space Station - ISS) Program Office in Reston, Va., during the requirements phase. Her group worked on software integration among the NASA centers, European Space Agency and NASDA (Japanese Space Agency). The Grumman team was headed by former Apollo 13 astronaut Fred Haise. Former Apollo and Shuttle astronaut T.K. Mattingly was also part of the Grumman team.
In the 1990s, Mary was the software manager for six scientific satellite projects at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). She coordinated the interface between the onboard and ground software for these missions. Four of these missions were Small Explorer missions (SMEX): Fast Auroral Snapshot Explorer (FAST), Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS), Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) and Wide-Field Infrared Explorer (WIRE). The SMEX missions utilized a new "smaller, faster, cheaper" approach to scientific research satellites and each of these satellites flew one scientific instrument, developed by scientists at leading universities. FAST, SWAS and TRACE were very successful missions and TRACE solar images are readily available for viewing on the Internet. The WIRE mission experienced a cryogenic failure shortly after launch. Although the primary WIRE science mission failed, a resourceful researcher was able to use the spacecraft's startracker to perform valuable "starquake" observations.
Mary was also the software manager for the GSFC X-Ray Spectrometer (XRS) Instrument which flew on the Japanese Astro-E Spacecraft. Astro-E was lost due to a launch failure. She also led the onboard firmware development effort for the onboard computers on Earth Observing-1 (EO-1). EO-1 was an experimental New Millennium Program design which successfully tried numerous new instrument and satellite technologies.
From 2000-2002 she was the ground software manager for the new Intelsat 9 commercial telecommunications satellite series. This series consists of seven satellites in geosynchronous orbit around the globe. She is currently (2004) the ground software requirements manager for Intelsat's entire operational spacecraft fleet of 23 satellites. Intelsat satellites have transmitted video, phone and data communications around the world since the 1960s. An early Intelsat satellite transmitted live video of the 1969 moon landing.