

The state of the United States means that a young person of color would have a hard path to an education. If I gave you that answer last year, it’s the same now. Before Katherine works as a computer at NASA, she's a little girl with a head for numbers. She and many other women made critical technical contributions to the space program.

Johnson worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center from 1953 to 1986. NASA research mathematician Katherine Johnson did the trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s historic mission. And it was a joy to contribute to the literature that was going to be coming out.īut you know, math is the same. Image Credit: NASA/Langley Research Center. I like the stars and the stories we were telling. The main thing is I liked what I was doing. I didn’t do anything alone but try to go to the root of the question – and succeeded there. Name:Date:1.41.4 Katherine JohnsonKatherine Johnson is an outstanding mathematician who worked for NASA on projects ranging fromthe birth of the space. Her calculations proved critical to the success of the Apollo Moon landings and the start of the Space Shuttle program. Her calculations proved critical to the success of the Apollo Moon landings and the start of the Space Shuttle. Katherine continued to work at NASA until 1986. Katherine continued to work at NASA until 1986. But when they went to computers, they called over and said, "Tell her to check and see if the computer trajectory they had calculated was correct." So I checked it, and it was correct. She was born in White Sulphur Springs in West.
Katherine johnson nasa works movie#
Johnson was also awarded the Presidential. belated fame through the movie Hidden Figures, was Katherine G.

You could do much more, much faster on the computer. She received many awards from NASA when she worked there, and in 1997, Johnson was named Mathematician of the Year. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I'll do it backward and tell you when to take off." That was my forte.Įven after NASA had electronic computers, John Glenn requested that Katherine personally recheck the computer calculations before his 1962 Friendship 7 flight – the first American mission to orbit Earth. As a human computer, Katherine calculated the trajectory for astronaut Alan Shepard’s 1961 Freedom 7 mission to space – the first spaceflight for an American.Įarly on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start.
