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“I did not realize how powerful it is to tell a story,” she said in 2017. Shetterly said this highlights the power of a narrative.

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Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignaniīut after the book and movie brought attention to these women mathematicians, NASA renamed a computing facility for Johnson in February 2019, and a street in front of NASA headquarters in Washington DC was renamed “Hidden Figures Way.” Johnson received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, and Christine Darden received Congressional Gold Medal in 2019, while Vaughan and Jackson received theirs posthumously. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden presents an award to Katherine Johnson, the African American mathematician, physicist, and space scientist, who calculated flight trajectories for John Glenn’s first orbital flight in 1962, at a reception to honor members of the segregated West Area Computers division of Langley Research Center on Thursday, Dec.

Even though the “human computers” – who were later called “math aides” - were a key part in all mission analysis and planning, they were unheralded, even within NASA. She also worked on the Space Shuttle program before retiring in 1986.īefore “Hidden Figures” the seminal work done by Johnson and her co-workers went largely unnoticed. Her calculations helped the lunar lander rendezvous with the orbiting Command and Service Module. Johnson considered her work on the Apollo missions to the Moon to be her greatest contribution to space exploration.

“If she says they’re good,’” Johnson recalled the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space. As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”-Katherine Johnson-to run the same numbers, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. The next year, as famously portrayed in the “Hidden Figures” movie, Johnson manually verified the calculations of NASA’s IBM 7090 computer, which would control the trajectory of the capsule in John Glenn’s Friendship 7 orbital mission. In 1961, Johnson computed the trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mission, the first to carry an American into space.

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Where you want it to come down, and I will tell you where and when and how to Johnson told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in 2012. “Our office computed all the trajectories,” At the same time, Virginia’s segregation laws restricted the women to where they could work and what bathroom they could use. The women were dedicated, and their high-quality work powered NASA’s first successful missions. The several dozen African American women who were part of the West Area Computing section were well-qualified and well-educated – some had more education than their white counterparts. “They were serving ourĬountry and serving our country’s highest ideals.” “But these women rolled up their sleeves and were reallyĬritical to the work that needed to be done,” she said. At that time, doing the tedious mathematical calculationsīy hand for aeronautics and then the early space missions was considered “women’s Laboratory in Virginia, part of NASA’s founding organization, the NationalĪdvisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA). These women worked as mathematicians in the 1940s, 50s andĦ0s at the all-black West Area Computing section at the Langley Aeronautical Katherine Johnson, 1918-2020 /Vkp0MgfwtH- NASA STEM Engagement February 24, 2020 And there will always, always be mathematics.' Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering and technology. Good experiences or bad experiences, when most of life happens in the middle.”

That we need to keep finding and telling “these stories until we have theĮntire spectrum of the experience, not just the tiny slices of the extremes of Shetterly said in a speech at the University of Minnesota in 2017. What it means to be black, to be female, to be a scientist and to be American,” “The women in ‘Hidden Figures’ upend all our perceptions of

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Margot Lee Shetterly, who wrote about Johnson’s life in the book “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race,” called her writing a “recuperative history.” She brought the bits and pieces of people’s lives together to help tell the full story of NASA’s history. Told, completely changed people’s perceptions about who has been – and who can Rocket trajectories for early space missions. NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson did more than just calculate