Marcie Smith

Marcie Smith received her master’s in Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering at Stanford University in 1980 and has been fortunate to have worked in unmanned planetary science flight operations ever since. She began as a flight operations engineer for the Pioneer program, and has managed flight operations for Galileo Probe, Lunar Prospector and Gravity Probe B, Kepler and K2 missions. She is currently the Mission Director for the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, (IRIS).  IRIS is a Small Explorer Mission to observe how solar material moves, gathers energy, and heats up as it travels through a little-understood region in the sun’s lower atmosphere.

Marcie is also a private pilot and flies a Cessna 182. She is an active member of the 99s – the International Organization of Women Pilots, and whenever she can, she flies for Angel Flight, an organization where private pilots use their airplanes to fly patients to medical appointments.