Dr. Rochelle Braunstein Abrams
ABRAMS: Dr. Rochelle Braunstein Abrams, who supported the U.S. space program as an aerospace software engineer for nearly half a century — designing, testing and maintaining flight software for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and NOAA’s Polar Operational Environmental Satellite (POES) Project — died on Saturday, May 30. She was two days shy of her 84th birthday. Rochelle died peacefully under hospice care at her home in a Memory Care community in Falls Church, Virginia, with her two daughters, Fern and Eve Abrams, by her side. Rochelle was born in Pittsburgh in 1942 to Leonard and Florence (Hiller) Braunstein and grew up amid a large, extended family of cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and her younger sister, Janet. Rochelle excelled in school, particularly mathematics, science and poetry.
As a grade school student visiting Pittsburgh’s planetarium, she was captivated by the prospect of humans venturing to the moon and beyond. She attended Taylor Allderdice High School and eventually went on to earn a BS Magna Cum Laude in chemistry (1963) and a PhD in chemistry (1967), both from the University of Pittsburgh. At 16 years old, Rochelle’s cousin, Sylvia Braunstein, introduced Rochelle to Sylvia’s classmate at Carnegie Tech (Carnegie Mellon University), Marshall Abrams, from Jersey City, New Jersey. Rochelle and Marshall married four years later and were together for 58 years until his death in 2020. After both earned PhDs at the University of Pittsburgh, they moved to Maryland, and eventually settled in the Forest Glen Park neighborhood in Silver Spring where they raised their family. After the birth of her second daughter, Eve, Rochelle returned to full-time work, first at the Computer Science Corporation, and then at a series of NASA contractors. She worked on the POES Project— a constellation of polar orbiting weather satellites intended to improve the accuracy and detail of weather analysis and forecasting — for nearly three decades. These satellites provided high quality weather and climate data to NOAA as well as supporting a host of scientific endeavors: climate research and prediction, global sea surface temperature measurements, ocean dynamics research, volcanic eruption monitoring, forest fire detection, global vegetation analysis and more. Rochelle worked supporting these satellites into her late 70s. Rochelle also supported the Hubble Space Telescope and the Space Telescope Data Archive and Distribution System. Through the course of her work, she received numerous performance awards and commendation letters from NASA Goddard, and its prime contractor, Boeing. To carry on her legacy, she and Dr. Marshall Abrams established the Dr. Rochelle Abrams Space Across the Curriculum Educator Scholarship Training Program to train and support teachers in exciting and educating school children about space. Rochelle is survived by her two daughters, Fern and Eve Abrams, her sons-in-law Greg Schatz (Eve Abrams) and David Talmage (Fern Abrams), as well as her two grandchildren of choice, Zoe and Isabel Alexander. Donations in Rochelle’s name can be made to the Jane Goodall Institute or the League of Women Voters. PJC
comments