Hello Classmates,
A lot has happened in my life since I graduated along with all of you from West High in 1973.
I enrolled in the University of Iowa to be close to home since I was still fairly new in United States, having lived here for only two years. I studied Physics and Astronomy, undergraduate, and Astronomy, graduate. After obtaining my degree in 1980, I moved to Southern California, and did work on navigation equipment for submarines, a far cry from my love of celestial exploration, although I learned a lot on that job and that’s where I met my future husband in 1981. He was also working as an engineer at the Autonetics division in Anaheim. We got married in 1983.
We had two children, a boy and a girl. We both changed jobs during that time. I moved to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena in 1985. That was my dream job. I worked on projects funded by NASA doing Mission Design for future missions to planets, asteroids and comets, and in 1992 I became a spacecraft navigator on the Cassini Mission to Saturn and spent the next 25 years as part of the Navigation Team, from concept through launch in 1997, up until the end of mission in 2017. From 2012 until my retirement in 2021 I was also part of navigation teams which evaluated concepts for future missions: the Europa Clipper, which will launch next year, and Europa Lander and Dragonfly, both of which will launch before the end of this decade. After Cassini I also did navigation on current missions, namely the Maven Mission around Mars, and the Juno Mission around Jupiter.
My life with my husband was very busy but beautiful. We loved being parents and participating in our children’s activities, and we also loved our jobs and worked really hard. To that we added a major remodel of our house, always planning ahead around our family. Sadly, all those plans came to a halt in 2001, when my husband died suddenly of Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy at the young age of 47, while playing soccer with the JPL team. Our children and I grieved for a long time, but we all did our best to continue our lives and always make him proud.
My son received a full basketball scholarship to play in Division 1 at Lehigh University, from where he graduated with a B.S in business. After working for 9 years at JPL, he went back to school to obtain a graduate degree in engineering. He’s now one semester away from accomplishing that goal. My daughter obtained a PhD in Oceanography from the University of Rhode Island, and after post-doctoral work at MIT, she’s now working for the EPA. She’s married with two daughters, whom I love a lot. I hope to explore new things in my retirement, be with my family more, help more as a grandmother, and be overall less stressed out.
I remember with fondness the two years I spent at West High, and I regret not becoming acquainted with more students while there. I barely knew English when I first arrived in United States in 1971, and communicating with others was very challenging. I hope you will all have a great time at our 50th high school reunion, and I am very sorry that I will not be in Iowa City to celebrate with you all. A warm hello to those I knew better: Patti Ampofo, Patricia Bravo, Julie Knight, Sue Hansen, Debbie Dee, Betsy Elliott, and of course, our webmaster, Dave Gerlits, to whom we all owe many thanks for keeping us connected over the years.
Rodica Ionasescu
