![]() “If she says they’re good,’” Johnson remembered Glenn saying, “then I’m ready to go.” So Glenn asked engineers to "get the girl," referring to Johnson, to run the computer equations by hand. The 1962 flight required the construction of a "worldwide communications network" linking tracking stations around the world to computers in Washington, D.C., Cape Canaveral and Bermuda.īut astronauts weren't keen on "putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts," according to NASA. She was also known for work that greatly contributed to the first American orbital spaceflight, piloted by John Glenn. She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s 1961 mission Freedom 7, which was America’s first human spaceflight, according to NASA. She was also the first woman in the Flight Research Division to receive credit as an author of a research report for her work with Ted Skopinski on detailing the equations describing an orbital spaceflight. She said her greatest contribution to space exploration was making "the calculations that helped sync Project Apollo’s Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module." In other words, helping to put men on the moon in 1969. Johnson began working at NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in 1953 at the Langley Laboratory in Virginia. Jackson died in 2005, and Vaughan died in 2008. The work of the women altered the country's history but their names were largely unknown until the movie received acclaim. 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.The film also stars Octavia Spencer as the mathematician Dorothy Vaughan and Janelle Monáe as the engineer Mary Jackson. In 1961, Johnson did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 Mission, the first to carry an American into space. “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 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. In 1962, she verified computer calculations that plotted John Glenn's earth orbits.Īt age 97, Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. In 1961, Johnson worked on the first mission to carry an American into space. Their work was the focus of the Oscar-nominated 2016 film. Until 1958, Johnson and other black women worked in a racially segregated computing unit at what is now called Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Johnson was one of the so-called “computers” who calculated rocket trajectories and earth orbits by hand during NASA's early years. In a Monday morning tweet, the space agency said it celebrates her 101 years of life and her legacy of excellence and breaking down racial and social barriers. NASA says Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who worked on NASA's early space missions and was portrayed in the film “Hidden Figures,” about pioneering black female aerospace workers, has died.
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