I went to work every day for 33 years happy. “This was what a research mathematician did. “I found what I was looking for at Langley,” she says. Katherine’s worked at Langley between 19. In total she co-authored 26 scientific papers, also working on the space shuttle program and on plans for a mission to Mars. She also helped develop better navigational procedures for the Apollo missions by analyzing data from tracking stations around the world.Īs an integral member of the team she helped write the first textbook on space. Katherine developed the first emergency navigation systems for astronauts by star-mapping. NASA would still call on her to verify the calculations even though NASA began using computers for the first time in 1962 to calculate John Glenn’s orbit around Earth. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I’ll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.’ That was my forte.” “Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start. “The early trajectory was a parabola, and it was easy to predict where it would be at any point,” Johnson says. Armstrong, commander Michael Collins, Command Module pilot and Edwin E. The 3-man crew aboard the flight that landed on the moon, consisted of Neil A. Katherine Johnson was a member of NASA’s historic 1961 team which calculated the flight paths of the first manned space flight in 1961 by astronaut Alan Shepard, the first manned orbit of Earth in 1962 by John Glenn, and the landing of the first man to walk on the moon by Neil Armstrong in 1969. Any error in calculations would cause astronauts to possibly not return from space. She would later join the research team on a permanent basis.Ī gifted mathematician, Katherine Johnson joined the tracking team for manned and unmanned missions and used math and physics to calculate complex spacecraft trajectories, navigation and the orbits or spacecraft. Katherine was assertive in meetings and her expert knowledge of analytic geometry won her allies with her male bosses and her colleagues. Even though the racial and gender barriers were there, Katherine says she ignored them. Opportunities for African Americans and women were limited at the time. One day she was temporarily assigned to the all male flight research team. This group read the data from black boxes of planes and carried out other precise mathematical tasks. In June 1953, Katherine Johnson was contracted to work as a research mathematician at Langley Research Center with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the agency that preceded National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in the “mathematics pool”. She taught in rural Virginia and rural West Virginia schools. Following in her mother’s footsteps, Katherine’s first job was an elementary school teacher. She earned a full scholarship that included tuition, room and board and graduated at age 18 summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science degree in French and mathematics from West Virginia State College. As an early math prodigy, she skipped through grades to graduate from high school at age 14. He enrolled Katherine and her older siblings in a school 125 miles away from home since the local schools only offered classes to African Americans through the eighth grade. Even though he quit school after the sixth grade, he considered education of paramount importance. Her father was a farmer and worked extra jobs as a janitor and her mother was a teacher. Katherine Johnson was born in 1918, to a poor family in West Virginia. A pioneer in the space industry, Johnson witnessed and played a critical role in some of the most historic moments of American space flight. There are many inspirational stories in this vein, but perhaps none as inspirational as the story of Katherine Johnson, a woman who transcended race and gender to become the first black woman to work as a research mathematician and physicist for NASA in 1953. The twentieth century was a time of minorities transcending traditional boundaries. is pleased to honor Katherine Johnson with the Science Lifetime Achievement award for her creativity and pioneering work and accomplishments in space flight.
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