Amy Walsh is the systems engineering lead at Ball Aerospace for the EPOXI mission. Walsh has been with Ball Aerospace since 2000. She previously worked for JPL from 1993 to 2000 as a member of the technical staff after graduating with an aerospace engineering degree from UCLA.

Growing up on the South Coast of California and the Western Slope of Colorado, she did well in math and science as a kid, but she didn’t realize she was an engineer until a high-school teacher pointed her in that direction after her junior year. She was lured in by thoughts of wind tunnels and aircraft and then in college, her imagination was captured by spacecraft.

She has worked on missions such as Deep Impact, Cassini, Galileo and WISE. Her most memorable work experience so far was seeing Comet 9P/Tempel 1 get larger and larger in the images sent from the two Deep Impact spacecraft as the Impactor maneuvered to collide with the comet on July 4, 2005.

In 2006, Women in Aerospace honored Walsh with an outstanding achievement award for her work on the Deep Impact program for Ball Aerospace. She has been active in the Society of Women Engineers since college and various education-outreach activities such as Colorado Project ASTRO-GEO.