The Engineer Who Went to Orbit
Ellen Ochoa was born in Los Angeles in 1958 and grew up in La Mesa, California. Her grandparents had come from Mexico. She was a serious flute player who seriously considered studying music, but she chose physics instead, and then went on to earn a master's degree and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1985.
Her research was in optics — the science of light. She helped develop systems that let a computer analyze an image and pick out what matters in it, the same basic idea behind the machine vision used today in factories and self-driving cars. Ochoa is a co-inventor on three patents covering an optical inspection system, an optical object-recognition method, and a technique for removing noise from images.
NASA selected her as an astronaut candidate in 1990. On her first mission in April 1993, aboard *Discovery*, she became the first Hispanic woman to fly in space. Her crew studied the Sun and Earth's atmosphere, including the chemistry of the ozone layer. Across four flights she logged nearly 1,000 hours in orbit, operated the shuttle's robotic arm, and helped deliver equipment and supplies to the International Space Station.
In 2013 Ochoa became director of NASA's Johnson Space Center — the first Hispanic director and only the second woman to hold the job. She led it until she retired in 2018.
