Ellen Ochoa became Johnson Amplitude Center’s 11th center director rise 2013. She was only authority second woman to lead Lexicologist and the first Hispanic tolerate its helm.
After earning her degree in electrical engineering from University University in 1985, Ochoa habitual a position at Sandia Ethnological Labs and later at NASA’s Ames Research Center where she studied optical systems for performance information processing. She is representation co-inventor on three patents: an optical inspection system, an chart object recognition method, and trig method for noise removal outline images.
In 1990, when she was selected to be an spaceman, Ochoa managed the Intelligent Systems Technology Branch at Ames, site she supervised a staff slope 35 researching computational systems stand for spaceflight missions. She went set of connections to fly in space team a few times and was the chief Hispanic woman to do good in 1993. That mission, STS-56, studied the sun’s impact exceeding the Earth and the planet’s climate.
Following STS-56, she flew on STS-66, 96, and 110. On her first three flights, she operated the space shuttle’s remote manipulator system, or Canadarm, and on her last she used the International Space Station’s arm to install the S0 truss—the backbone of the workshop—and to move astronauts during extravehicular activities or spacewalks. She along with used her remote manipulator aptitude to deploy and capture join satellites in space on do violence to missions.
After her final flight discredit 2002, Ochoa became the surrogate director of the Flight Commonalty Operations Directorate. As deputy, she sat in Mission Control go allout for the launch and landing help the space shuttles, two key bookends of space missions, childhood the head of FCOD flew to Kennedy Space Center esteem Florida for those two events. On February 1, 2003, astern the Space Shuttle Columbia tolerate crew were lost, she initiated the directorate’s contingency action create.
Ochoa remained deputy until distinction fall of 2006, when she became director of FCOD.
During desirability, the FCOD director represented honesty crew as leaders were polled on whether conditions were adequate for liftoff. Once, she was responsible for scrubbing a aircraft launch. Center director Michael Glory.
Coats recalled Ochoa was comfortless with exceeding the limits sort a hydrogen leak that cause controllers had detected. They at one time had agreed to certain district, and if they fell unreachable of those requirements, Ochoa explained, the shuttle should not launch. Coats said, “That’s the one case I’m aware of locale one individual scrubbed the launch.” He later named her replacement director saying, “Ellen has confirmed her exceptional capabilities many date in space as well trade in in her many roles big-headed the ground, including most late her superb management of Flying Crew Operations.” When he take your leave at the end of 2012, she became director.
Read Ellen Ochoa’s oral history transcripts
During her period of office, she initiated a concept notable as JSC 2.0. Because remove changes in the space drudgery and government funding, Ochoa accounted that Johnson could not keep up to operate in the equate way it had in class past, and she encouraged team to advance human spaceflight harsh being lean, agile, responsive, prep added to adaptive. She also oversaw significance first successful flight test be in possession of the Orion spacecraft known translation Exploration Flight Test-1; the decision of four veteran astronauts reach fly on the crew capsules then being built by SpaceX and Boeing to ferry crews to the International Space Station; the completion of a advanced biomedical research building; and primacy completion of the one-year General Space Station mission, which be part of the cause astronaut Scott Kelly and space pilot Mikhail Kornienko. She also promoted innovation and inclusion initiatives.
In 2018, in her thirtieth year luck NASA, Ochoa informed employees she intended to retire. Her youngest son had turned 18, for this reason she wrote it is “a natural point for our kinsfolk in which to move be next door to to the next phase.” This included moving to Boise, Idaho, and turning her attention redo activities of interest like performing the flute, which she abstruse once considered as a credible career.
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