Birth: May 10, 1958
Specialty: Electrical Engineering
Major Contributions:
Former Director of Johnson Space Center
Co-inventor on three patents in the field of optics
Inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame, 2017
Recipient of Presidential Medal of Freedom
Finding her way to engineering through a love of mathematics, Dr. Ellen Ochoa earned a doctorate in electrical engineering and continued her research in the private sector before being hired at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
In 1991 she was formally announced as an astronaut for NASA making her the first Hispanic woman to be selected to fly into space. During her first mission aboard the Discovery in 1993, she used the remote manipulator system, or RMS, robotic arm to deploy and capture the Spartan satellite.
As the payload commander aboard the Atlantis in 1994, she used the RMS again. This time to retrieve the CRISTA-SPAS atmospheric research satellite.
Her next flight was in 1999, again on the shuttle Discovery, during a ten-day mission that included the first docking to the International Space Station.
Her final flight into space was a 2002 mission which visited the ISS delivering the S0 Truss that Dr. Ochoa, along with two other crew members, installed using the station’s robotic arm.
Logging nearly 1000 hours in orbit, Ochoa returned to Earth and continued her career at NASA including being appointed deputy director of flight crew operations in 2002.
It was just a few months later that tragedy struck with the destruction of the shuttle Columbia and the loss of its crew during reentry. For Ochoa, it was important to use this event as a catalyst to ask the hard questions about how the mission management team worked together in addition to the technical questions of returning to space.
It was announced in 2012 that Dr. Ochoa would become the director of the Johnson Space Center–the second woman and first Hispanic to fill this role. While the director, she wanted us to learn as much as we could from the space environment including the economic, technological, and potential medical benefits.
She also enjoys speaking to groups of students and encourages young women to explore science as a career releasing a bilingual children’s book, We Are All Scientists, in 2022.
Written by Angela Goad
Sources:
NASA Astronaut Dr. Ellen Ochoa
NASA Johnson Space Center Director Ellen Ochoa to Be Inducted Into U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame
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