Michele Connerton

Michele Connerton is the contracting officer for the Hubble Space Telescope Project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. She began her support of the Hubble mission in 2013, and has overall and primary responsibility for the administration of Hubble’s two major contracts: the science operations contract that runs the Space Telescope Science Institute and the mission operations and system engineering contract that supports flight operations at Goddard.

Connerton started her career at NASA in 1985 as a secretary. Soon after, she went back to school at night to earn a bachelor’s degree. This allowed her to switch her career to procurement support and in 1997 she moved into Goddard’s procurement organization. Her first assignment was as a contract administrator supporting the Space Sciences Directorate, awarding and administering contracts that provided research personnel for the science and technology activities being conducted by NASA scientists.

After several years supporting the science community, Connerton moved on to mission support, gaining extensive experience with the procurement of flight instruments, spacecraft and their operations. She began by providing contract support needed to execute several missions in the Explorers Program – a NASA initiative to provide frequent flight opportunities for world-class scientific investigations utilizing innovative, streamlined and efficient management approaches within the heliophysics and astrophysics science areas. She worked in a similar capacity on the Solar Dynamics Observatory project, a mission designed to study the solar atmosphere and increase understanding of the Sun's influence on Earth and near-Earth space. An opportunity next arose for Connerton to be part of NASA’s Mars initiative. She accepted the role of contracting officer responsible for the instrument suite known as Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) that is on the Mars Science Lab, otherwise known as the Curiosity rover. Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012 and continues to traverse the planet and send back science data.

A native of Maryland, Connerton was born in Baltimore and received her Bachelor of Science degree in technology and management from the University of Maryland. She currently lives in Annapolis with her husband and daughter. When not supporting the many activities of her daughter, she enjoys yoga, cooking and traveling.