Her calculations helped the lunar lander rendezvous with the orbiting command service module. Johnson considered her work on the Apollo moon missions to be her greatest contribution to space exploration. “Katherine organized herself immediately at her desk, growing phone-book-thick stacks of data sheets a number at a time, blocking out everything except the labyrinth of trajectory equations,” Margot Lee Shetterly wrote in her 2016 book “Hidden Figures,” on which the film is based. “Get the girl to check the numbers,” a computer-skeptical Glenn had insisted in the days before the launch. The next year, she manually verified the calculations of a nascent NASA computer, an IBM 7090, which plotted John Glenn’s orbits around the planet. In 1961, Johnson did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mission, the first to carry an American into space.
#MATHEMATICIAN KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA HOW TO#
“You tell me when and where you want it to come down, and I will tell you where and when and how to launch it.” “Our office computed all the (rocket) trajectories,” Johnson told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in 2012. But her work at NASA’s Langley Research Center eventually shifted to Project Mercury, the nation’s first human space program. Johnson focused on airplanes and other research at first. Signs had dictated which bathrooms the women could use. Johnson and other black women initially worked in a racially segregated computing unit in Hampton, Virginia, that wasn’t officially dissolved until NACA became NASA in 1958. Johnson was one of the “computers” who solved equations by hand during NASA’s early years and those of its precursor organization, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Her story and her grace continue to inspire the world.” No cause was given.īridenstine tweeted that the NASA family “will never forget Katherine Johnson's courage and the milestones we could not have reached without her. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said on Twitter that she died Monday morning. Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who calculated rocket trajectories and earth orbits for NASA’s early space missions and was later portrayed in the 2016 hit film “Hidden Figures,” about pioneering black female aerospace workers, has died. Henson and Kevin Costner, released in 2017, is based on Katherine’s contributions to John Glenn’s orbit mission.HAMPTON, Va.
The movie, Hidden Figures, starring Taraji P. Katheryn passed away in February 2020 in a retirement home in Newport News, VA, at the age of 101, passing in her prime (perfect nerd joke for the math genius she was). She would also work with the Space Shuttle program, Earth Resources Satellite, and on plans for future missions to Mars. Her design of using a one-star method would allow the crew to determine their location with accuracy. In 1970 when the Apollo 13 mission was aborted, she was called in, and her work on backup procedures and charts would set the safe path home for the crew. Johnson would say in an interview later, “He looked to this Black woman in the still-segregated South at the time as one of the key parts of making sure his mission would be a success.” The numbers were confirmed, and history was made. He refused to fly unless her numbers matched. On John Glenn’s first orbit around the Earth, he called on her personally to verify the calculation of the electronic computer.
Katherine Johnson, also Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson, 1983.
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