Cosmic Background Explorer
After beginning her government career as a presidential management intern, she worked on Capitol Hill, as a senior engineer at NASA Goddard, as a senior policy analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and as deputy division director for technology at NASA Headquarters. Hartman has built and launched scientific balloon payloads, worked on robotic vision, overseen the development of the command and data handling systems for a variety of Earth-observing spacecraft, and served as NASA program manager for dozens of missions, the most successful of which was the Cosmic Background Explorer. Data from the COBE spacecraft gained two NASA-sponsored scientists the Nobel Prize in physics in 2006.