Katherine johnson nasa mathematician movie#

As part of the pre-flight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl” – referring to Johnson – insisting that she run the numbers through the same equations by hand to check the computer’s calculations. The agency was relying on a network of computers, programmed with orbital equations that would control the trajectory of Glenn’s capsule. Less than a year later, NASA was preparing for the mission that would see Glenn become the first US astronaut to orbit Earth in February 1962. In May 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first US citizen and second person in the world to go to space. Meanwhile, at NACA (which had since become NASA), Johnson had been working on the trajectory analysis for the US’s first human space flight. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 – the first artificial Earth satellite – and in April 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to journey into space and orbit Earth. At the same time, the space race between the US and the Soviet Union was heating up.

Over the next four years, she worked alongside aeronautical engineers analysing data from flight tests. Within two weeks of working at Langley, Johnson’s talent landed her a position in the Flight Research Division. Johnson refused to use the “colored” toilets and ate lunch at her desk. In addition to the computing pool, the toilets and cafeteria at Langley were also racially segregated at the time. Johnson Computational Research Facility at the Langley Research Center to commemorate the hard work she did to help take them to the stars.In 1953, Johnson started working at the all-Black West Area Computing section of the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which would later become the space agency NASA. In her honor, NASA had dedicated the Katherine G. Johnson died on February 24, 2020, at the age of 101.

Katherine johnson nasa mathematician movie#

It wasn’t until the 2016 release of the movie Hidden Figures that these women received widespread recognition. Yet unlike the white male astronauts she helped launch into space, no one knew of the groundbreaking work Johnson and dozens of other Black women did for NASA and space exploration. In 1969, she calculated the trajectories of Neil Armstrong’s historic mission to the moon on Apollo 11. A year later she helped figure out John Glenn’s orbit of the planet, another American first. One of her biggest accomplishments at NASA was helping calculate the trajectory, or path, of the country’s first human spaceflight in 1961, making sure astronaut Alan B. During her time there, she broke racial barriers, like using the bathroom that was supposed to be for white women only. She and the other women worked as “human computers,” figuring out the difficult calculations needed for spaceflight. In 1952, when she was 34 years old, she learned about jobs for Black women with mathematics and computing skills at the Langley laboratory at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which would later become NASA. She later enrolled in graduate school at West Virginia University to study math but left early to raise a family and return to teaching. After she graduated with honors at 18, Johnson taught Black students math. She started high school when she was just 10 years old (most kids are in fourth or fifth grade when they’re 10!) and college when she was 15.

Math came easy to her, but she worked hard to master geometry and algebra. Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on August 26, 1918.