The building named in her honor, the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility at NASA's Langley Research Center, dedicated today (May 5), commemorates Katherine Johnson's exceptional work calculating trajectories and orbits as a NASA mathematician. The space shuttle bearing her name will launch this month.The Katherine G. Her name is finally recognized as the brilliant, pioneering, once-“hidden” figure that she was.
In February 2020, Johnson passed away at the age of 101. Her work helped bring space travel from its earliest iterations into the computer age. Her career at NASA lasted 33 years, during which she authored or coauthored 26 research reports and worked on critical NASA projects. In 2015, Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
Like many of the female computers, and particularly her Black colleagues, Johnson’s work remained relatively unrecognized by the public until recent years. The astronaut aboard, John Glenn, was said to have only trusted the finicky early computers once Johnson had done the math herself. The next year, her orbital calculations were critical to the first American orbit by a manned craft. In 1961 aboard Freedom 7, Alan Shepard became the first American in space-his flight trajectory was analyzed by Johnson. Under NASA, segregated work spaces were integrated the women collectively would be awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in 2019 for their decades of under-appreciated work running equations and data until the advent of sufficient computers in the 1980s. was determined to make it to the Moon before the Soviets. The Russians had launched their satellite Sputnik the year earlier, and the U.S. In 1958, NACA became NASA in pursuit of space flight. At the time, an increasing number of women were being hired to run numbers, but the workers were still segregated due to the Jim Crow laws in effect in Virginia. In 1953, she was hired and began working in the West Area Computing group at NACA. In 1952, she heard news that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was hiring Black female mathematicians as “human computers” to crunch numbers for flight data. After graduating, she worked as a teacher and started a family. Beginning college at age 15, she particularly excelled in geometry-which would later lead to her work on orbital paths in space. Johnson, who was born in 1918 in West Virginia, showed exceptional math prowess from an early age. In November 2020, a satellite was also named “Katherine Johnson” in her honor.
Mathematician katherine johnson nasa verification#
In 2019, NASA renamed one of its West Virginia facilities the Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility. The company cited Johnson’s pioneering mathematical work, saying, “Her work at NASA quite literally launched Americans into space, and her legacy continues to inspire young Black women every day.” The new craft named in her honor is far from the first STEM-related development that bears her name. Northrop Grumman traditionally names its spacecrafts after pivotal figures in space exploration history.
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