However, her contribution to the cause of women in STEM will never be obsolete. Johnson Computational Research Facility.Ī 101-year-old Johnson passed away on February 24, 2020. A year later, in September 2017, NASA honored the 99-year-old Johnson by dedicating a brand-new research facility bearing her name, the Katherine G. Henson portrayed Katherine Johnson in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. Johnson retired in 1986 and then spent the following years inspiring children to pursue STEM education by sharing stories about her exceptional career. 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.” She told NASA in a 2008 interview that “Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start. Katherine, once briefed on the task, did the opposite of what they were asking: she did the calculations backwards, starting from the splash down and working backwards to determine the orbital trajectory and the launch pad. John Glenn (a decorated military pilot and astronaut) asked the engineers who had computed the orbital equations that would control the capsule’s orbital trajectory from launch to splashdown to get Katherine to run through the same equations by hand. NASA’s preparation for its first orbital mission provided a breakthrough for Katherine’s career. Over time, NACA eventually became NASA and when this happened, Katherine was part of the team that formed the core of the Space Task Group, NASA’s first official venture into space travel. She then spent the next four years in that department analyzing data from flight tests. She was assigned a key project in the Flight Research Division with her temporal position becoming permanent due to her performance. In 1953, after moving to Newport, Katherine began work as a temporal staff at the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s) Langley laboratory. However, she left after the first session to start her family. They were the first black students at the school. In 1939, she and two other black men were offered positions for graduate studies at the newly integrated Virginia State University. She enrolled into the Virginia State College at age 18 where she quickly went through the school’s math’s curriculum and graduated with the highest honors in 1937. She was interested in numbers at a young age and throughout her life. The youngest of four children, Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918. NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson was instrumental in several NASA projects during the Space Race, including determining the Apollo 11 mission's necessary trajectory to reach the moon and return. Retelling the tale of a woman who genuinely overcame all odds is a beautiful way to commemorate our journey as women. It is incomprehensible that her work-along with other black women who served as NASA "computers"-went unrecognized for so long. The world was awestruck by the tale of Katherine Johnson, which was made famous by the 2016 Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures.
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