White Sands Missile Range Hall of Fame

Joy Arthur was born in Manila, Philippines, on 02 December 1935. She earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 1956. She began working at WSMR in May 1958 developing instrumentation and was the first woman engineer to work at White Sands.

In 1962, she transferred to what is now known as the Army Research Laboratory’s Survivability and Lethality Analysis Directorate, Information Electronic Protection Division. There, she evolved as a national leader in supporting Army systems to determine their vulnerabilities to electronic warfare countermeasures.

Joy innovated techniques to increase the dispersion efficiency of chaff and demonstrated absorbing chaff, environmentally degradable chaff, illuminated chaff, chaff rockets and rounds.

She designed, developed and demonstrated jamming technology. This included a missile-borne X-band jammer with a hydrazine-driven power supply. A multi-spectral jammer Joy devised used explosively-detonated inert gases.

Her numerous other projects included determining the vulnerabilities of Army weapons such as the Patriot and MLRS, protecting sensors against frequency-agile laser threats, developing non-lethal weaponry, creating radio-frequency decoys that simulate helicopters, and detecting the unintentional radiated emissions from electronic systems and underground facilities.

Joy retired in February 2005 after 46 years of inventive and proactive service to the country.