Janice E. Voss

Janice Elaine Voss (October 8, 1956 – February 6, 2012) was an American engineer and a NASA astronaut. Voss received her B.S. in engineering science from Purdue University, her M.S. in electrical engineering from MIT, and her PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT. Voss died in Arizona on February 6, 2012, from breast cancer.

Education Voss was born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1956 and grew up in Rockford, Illinois, where she received her kindergarten-6th grade education from Maud E. Johnson Elementary School and Guilford Center School. In 1972, Voss graduated from Minnechaug Regional High School in Wilbraham, Massachusetts. After high school, Voss went on to earn her Bachelor of Science in engineering science from Purdue University in 1975. During her time at Purdue, she was a member of Alpha Phi Omega. Voss continued her education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning her Master of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1977, completing her thesis on Kalman filtering techniques. As a Draper Laboratory Fellow, she worked on developing software for the space shuttle program. Voss earned her Doctor of Philosophy in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. The book tells the story of a young girl who must travel through time to save her father. In the book, the young girl's mother is a Nobel Prize winning biologist. Voss claims that the powerful female roles did not strike her as unusual, but were the norms she accepted in life. During her career as an astronaut, her technical assignments included working Spacelab/Spacehab issues for the Astronaut Office Mission Development Branch, and robotics issues for the Robotics Branch. As an STS-99 crew member on the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, she and her fellow crew members worked continuously in shifts to produce what was at the time the most accurate digital topographic map of the Earth.

From October 2004 to November 2007, she was the Science Director for NASA's Kepler space telescope, a Sun-orbiting satellite designed to find Earth-like extrasolar planets in nearby planetary systems. It was launched in March 2009 and operated through October 2018. At the Astronaut Office Station Branch, she served as the Payloads Lead. She also worked for Orbital Sciences Corporation in flight operations support.

The VOSS Model is a scaled model of the Solar System, dedicated to Janice Voss, located at Purdue University's Discovery Park in West Lafayette, Indiana.