Ellen Ochoa

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Ellen Ochoa. (credit: NASA)

(born May 10, 1958, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.) U.S. astronaut. She earned a master's degree (1981) and a doctorate (1985) in electrical engineering at Stanford University. Specializing in the development of optical systems, she later helped create several systems and methods that were awarded patents. In 1990 Ochoa was selected to participate in NASA's astronaut program, and the following year she completed her training to become the first Hispanic female astronaut. In April 1993 she served as mission specialist aboard the shuttle Discovery. Ochoa's later missions included traveling to the International Space Station in 1999 and 2002.

For more information on Ellen Ochoa, visit Britannica.com.

A specialist in optics and optical recognition in robotics, Ellen Ochoa (born 1958) is noted both for her distinguished work in inventions and patents and for her role in American space exploration.

Among Ellen Ochoa's optical systems innovations are a device that detects flaws and image recognition apparatus. In the late 1980s she began working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as an optical specialist. After leading a project team, Ochoa was selected for NASA's space flight program. She made her first flight on the space shuttle Discovery in April 1993, becoming the first Hispanic woman astronaut.

The third of five children of Rosanne (Deardorff) and Joseph Ochoa, she was born May 10, 1958, in Los Angeles, California. She grew up in La Mesa, California; her father was a manager of a retail store and her mother a homemaker. Ochoa attended Grossmont High School in La Mesa and then studied physics at San Diego State University. She completed her bachelor's degree in 1980 and was named valedictorian of her graduating class; she then moved to the department of electrical engineering at Stanford University. She received her master's degree in 1981 and her doctorate in 1985, working with Joseph W. Goodman and Lambertus Hesselink . The topic of her dissertation was real-time intensity inversion using four-wave mixing in photorefractive crystals. While completing her doctoral research she developed and patented a real-time optical inspection technique for defect detection. In an interview with Marianne Fedunkiw, Ochoa said that she considers this her most important scientific achievement so far.

In 1985 she joined Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, where she became a member of the technical staff in the Imaging Technology Division. Her research centered on developing optical filters for noise removal and optical methods for distortion-invariant object recognition. She was coauthor of two more patents based on her work at Sandia, one for an optical system for nonlinear median filtering of images and another for a distortion-invariant optical pattern recognition system.

It was during her graduate studies that Ochoa began considering a career as an astronaut. She told Fedunkiw that friends were applying who encouraged her to join them; ironically, she was the only one from her group of friends to make it into space. Her career at NASA began in 1988 as a group leader in the Photonic Processing group of the Intelligent Systems Technology Branch, located at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. She worked as the technical lead for a group of eight people researching optical-image and data-processing techniques for space-based robotics. Six months later she moved on to become chief of the Intelligent Systems Technology Branch. Then in January 1990 she was chosen for the astronaut class, becoming an astronaut in July of 1991.

Her first flight began April 8, 1993, on the orbiter Discovery. She was mission specialist on the STS-56 Atmospheric Research flight, which was carrying the Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications and Science, known as Atlas-2. She was responsible for their primary payload, the Spartan 201 Satellite, and she operated the robotic arm to deploy and retrieve it. This satellite made forty-eight hours of independent solar observations to measure solar output and determine how the solar wind is produced. Ochoa was the lone female member of the five-person team which made 148 orbits of the earth.

Ochoa's technical assignments have also included flight-software verification in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL), where she was crew representative for robotics development, testing and training, as well as crew representative for flight-software and computer-hardware development. Ochoa was on the STS-66 Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications and Science-3 (ATLAS-3) flight in November 1994. ATLAS-3 continues the Spacelab flight series to study the Sun's energy during an eleven-year solar cycle; the primary purpose of this is to learn how changes in the irradiance of the Sun affect the Earth's environment and climate. On this mission Ochoa was Payload Commander. She is currently based at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Ochoa is a member of the Optical Society of America and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She has received a number of awards from NASA including the NASA Group Achievement Award for Photonics Technology in 1991 and the NASA Space Flight Medal in 1993. In 1994, she received the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Engineering Achievement Award. She has also been recognized many times by the Hispanic community. Ochoa was the 1990 recipient of the National Hispanic Quincentennial Commission Pride Award. She was also given Hispanic magazine's 1991 Hispanic Achievement Science Award, and in 1993 she won the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Medallion of Excellence Role Model Award. Ochoa is also a member of the Optical Society of America, the American Institute of Aeronautics ands Astronautics, and Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi honor societies.

Ochoa is married to Coe Fulmer Miles, a computer research engineer. They have no children. Outside of her space research, Ochoa counts music and sports as hobbies. She is an accomplished classical flautist - in 1983 she was the Student Soloist Award Winner in the Stanford Symphony Orchestra. She also has her private pilot's license and in training for space missions flies "back seat" in T-38 aircraft.

Further Reading

NASA Johnson Space Center, Missions Highlights STS-56, May 1993.

NASA Johnson Space Center, Biographical Data - Ellen Ochoa, August 1993.

NASA Johnson Space Center, Biographical Data - Ellen Ochoa,, "http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/Ochoa.html," July 22, 1997.

Ochoa, Ellen, Interview with Marianne Fedunkiw, conducted March 18, 1994.

This article's introduction section may not adequately summarize its contents. To comply with Wikipedia's lead section guidelines, please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of the article's key points. (March 2009)

Ellen Lauri Ochoa
Astronaut
Born	May 10, 1958 (1958-05-10) (age 51) Los Angeles, California
Other occupation	Engineer
Time in space	40d 19h 37m
Selection	1990 NASA Group
Missions	STS-56, STS-66, STS-96, STS-110
Mission insignia

Ellen Lauri Ochoa (born May 10, 1958) is a former astronaut and engineer, and current Deputy Director of the Johnson Space Center.^[1]

Contents 1 Personal life 2 Research career 3 NASA career 4 References 5 External links

Personal life

Ellen Ochoa was born on May 10, 1958 in Los Angeles, California, but considers La Mesa, California to be her hometown. She graduated from Grossmont High School, La Mesa, California, in 1975. Ellen received a bachelor of science degree in physics from San Diego State University in 1980, a master of science degree and doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1981 and 1985, respectively(1). Her parents got divorced when she was in high school and so she lived with her mother, three brothers and one sister.

She is married to Coe Fulmer Miles, with whom she has two children.

Research career

As a pioneer of spacecraft technology, she patented an optical system to detect defects in a repeating pattern. At the NASA Ames Research Center, she led a research group working primarily on optical systems for automated space exploration.

As a doctoral student at Stanford, and later as a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories and NASA Ames Research Center, Ochoa investigated optical system for performing information processing.

Ochoa is a co-inventor on three patents for an optical inspection system, an optical object recognition method, and a method for noise removal in images. As Chief of the Intelligent Systems Technology Branch at Ames, she supervised the 35 engineers scientists in the research and development of computational systems for aerospace missions. Ochoa has presented numerous papers at technical conferences and in scientific journals.

NASA career

Ochoa became the first Hispanic woman in the world to go to space^[2][3] when she served on a nine-day mission aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1993. The astronauts were studying the Earth's ozone layer. In her honor, Pasco School District # 1 in Pasco, Washington had named their newest middle school after her.

Ochoa was selected by NASA in January 1990 and became an astronaut in July 1991. Her technical assignments in the Astronaut Office includes serving as the crew representative for flight software, computer hardware and robotics, Assistant for Space Station to the Chief of the Astronaut Office, lead spacecraft communicator(CAPCOM) in Mission Control, and as acting as Deputy Chief of the Astronaut Office. A veteran of four Space flights, Ochoa has logged over 978 hours in space. She was a mission specialist on STS-56 (1993), was payload commander on STS-66, and was mission specialist and flight engineer on STS-96 and STS-110(2002).^[4][5] She is currently Deputy Director of the Johnson Space Center, helping to manage and direct the Astronaut Office and Aircraft Operations, and is retired from spacecraft operations.

References

1. ^ Bio at NASA
2. ^ Guide to Hispanic Heritage
3. ^ Space Today Online - Man In Space Firsts - table of contents
4. ^ "Astronaut Bio: Ellen Ochoa". NASA. 2006-10. http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/ochoa.html. Retrieved 2007-01-25. 
5. ^ spacefacts biography of Ellen Ochoa

External links

• Biography of Ochoa from IEEE

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