Judith Resnick (top right) was one of seven astronauts who died when the space shuttle Challenger exploded. The others were (from bottom left) Michael J. Smith, Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, Ronald E. McNair, (from top left) Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis and Resnick. Associated Press

On April 5, 1949, Judith A. Resnick, the second woman to go into orbit and one of the astronauts killed when the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff in 1986, was born in Akron. Resnick graduated from Firestone High School in Akron in 1966, where she received a perfect score on the SAT. She received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1970 and a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Maryland in 1977. She was a classical pianist and gourmet cook who loved to run, ride her bike and fly. Before receiving her NASA appointment, she was a biomedical engineer at the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and a product developer/systems engineer for Xerox Corp. Selected by NASA in January 1978, Resnick was among the first women to join the space program. Her first flight was on the shuttle Discovery's maiden mission in 1984. She was a mission specialist and logged 144 hours and 57 minutes during 96 earth obits on that flight. She and six others died aboard Challenger on Jan. 28, 1986.

Rebecca Goodman

E-mail rgoodman@enquirer.com or call (513) 768-8361.