Her four space shuttle flights include the 1993 Discovery mission, the May 1999 Discovery mission for the first docking with the International Space Station (ISS), and the April 2002 Atlantis flight to the ISS, where she operated the robotic arm. She logged more than 978 hours in space before retiring from spacecraft operations in 2007. She went on to become the deputy director of the Flight Crew Operations Directorate at the Johnson Space Center. Ochoa was chief of the Intelligent Systems Technology Branch at NASA's Ames Research Center when selected as an astronaut in 1991.