![]() Katherine Johnson, one of the NASA mathematicians died on February 24, 2020. In 2017 she was a central figure in the Academy nominated film Hidden Figures. Johnson was included in the list of "BBC 100 Women," a list of 100 inspiring and influential women from around the globe. This occurred on the 55th anniversary of Alan Shepard's historic rocket launch and splashdown, which Johnson helped make possible. Johnson Computational Research Facility was formally dedicated at the agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The movie was set for release in December. Katherine Johnson Johnson also played an important role in NASA’s Mercury program (196163) of crewed spaceflights. The following year, principal production began for Hidden Figures, a movie about Johnson and her Black colleagues at NASA, based on the non-fiction book of the same name. In 2015, President Barack Obama included Johnson on a list of 17 Americans to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Johnson was given an Honorary Doctor of Laws, SUNY Farmingdale (1998), and West Virginia State College Outstanding Alumnus of the Year (1999). Johnson was the recipient of the Group Achievement Award, NASA's Lunar Spacecraft and Operations. For her pioneering work in the field of navigation problems, she was the recipient of the Group Achievement Award presented to NASA's Lunar Spacecraft and Operations team. Later, she studied new navigation procedures to determine more practical ways to track manned and unmanned space missions. Johnson analyzed data gathered by tracking stations around the world during the lunar orbital missions-the Apollo moon missions. ![]() The spacecraft includes the Earth Resources Satellite, which has helped locate underground minerals and other earth resources. She has worked on challenging problems of interplanetary trajectories, space navigation, and the orbits of spacecraft. She was an Aerospace Technologist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia. Johnson worked for NASA with the tracking teams of manned and unmanned orbital missions. She was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and was trained as a mathematician and physicist at West Virginia State University. She was a Black physicist, space scientist, and mathematician. For her incredible contributions to space exploration in her 30 years at NASA, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama, America's highest civilian honor.Katherine G. Her calculations were also critical to the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the moon. ![]() Glenn’s flight was a success, and turned the tide of the Space Race. In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Katherine was personally called upon by Glenn to ensure his safety by recalculating and rechecking flight trajectories that had already been programmed into the computer. The report, coauthored with Ted Skopinski laid out the equations describing an orbital spaceflight in which the landing position of the spacecraft is specified. In 1960, she made history as the first woman in the Flight Research Division that had received credit as an author of a research report. At NASA, Katherine did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 mission Freedom 7, America’s first human spaceflight. NACA soon became NASA after the 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik. In 1952, a relative told her about open positions at the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s) Langley laboratory Led by Dorothy Vaughn. She enrolled in the graduate mathematics program at West Virginia University. She excelled in mathematics in college and graduated with the highest honors in 1937, taking a job teaching at a black public school in Virginia afterward. When West Virginia finally decided to quietly desegregate its schools, she was one of three black students to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools. Her mathematical prowess helped keep astronauts safe and on course during Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. Before there were mechanical computers, there was Katherine Johnson. Born in 1918 in White Sulpher Springs, West Virginia, she grew up grades ahead of her peers in school. Katherine Johnson was a leading light at NASA and an indispensable part of its early space exploration programs. Katherine Johnson led an extraordinary life.
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