[2][3] At JPL, she has participated in the exploration of the Moon, the Sun, all the planets, and other bodies in the Solar System.

In 1955, Susan Finley began studying art and architecture at Scripps College, in Claremont, California, with the intention of becoming an architect.

At the age of 21, she left Scripps College to become an engineer with a thermodynamics group at Convair in Pomona, California.

According to Susan Finley, balancing her work and family lives was difficult because of the "lack of good child care options," although she believes that women still face these struggles today.

[4] Finley dropped out of Scripps College, after three years of studying, and applied for a filing clerk position at Convair in Pomona, California.

In 1958, Susan Finley took a position at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, as a computer.

[11][12] This act was put into action shortly after the Soviet Union launched its satellite, Sputnik.

[2][14] Two days after Finley was hired, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched the United States' first-ever satellite: Explorer 1.

Following the failure, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory asked Finley to calculate the velocity data of Pioneer 3, and she was successful in providing the sought after information.

Ranger 3 was of great importance as it was NASA's first attempt to hardland a spacecraft of the surface of the Moon.

Much to their disappointment, Ranger 3 missed the moon by 22,000 miles, due to multiple malfunctions within the spacecraft's guidance system.

It was a calculation Finley made that demonstrated to NASA that Ranger 3 had missed the Moon by such a large margin.

[2][16] Susan Finley took a leave of absence from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to allow her husband to begin his graduate degree at the University of California, Riverside.

[2] Finley returned to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1962 once her husband finished his master's degree.

Throughout her career, Finley provided both manual computation work and FORTRAN programs as part of JPL's missions to the Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, in the Ranger, Mariner, Pioneer, Viking, and Voyager programs.

Later, in the 1980s, Finley switched to software testing and subsystem engineering for the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN).

The research group tracked the Russian spacecraft Vega which carried a French balloon to Venus on its journey to Halley's comet.

Finley worked with the Mars Exploration Rover missions and developed technology in which musical tones were sent at differing phases of descent through the Martian atmosphere and were transmitted back to DSN.

The program had the rover send musical tones back to the command center once each stage of the craft's descent.

[7] This certificate is "awarded to any combination of government and/or non-government individuals for an outstanding group accomplishment that has contributed substantially to NASA's mission".