Photo By Laurie Pearson | A historical park bench marker in Katherine G. Johnson’s honor at Carousel Park in...... read more read more
Katherine Johnson returned to teaching when her three daughters got older, but it wasn’t until 1952 that 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, headed by fellow West Virginian Dorothy Vaughan.
Katherine and her husband decided to move the family to Newport News, Virginia, to pursue the opportunity, and Katherine began work at Langley in the summer of 1953. Just two weeks into her tenure in the office, Dorothy Vaughan assigned her to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division, and Katherine’s temporary position soon became permanent. She spent the next four years analyzing data from flight tests and worked on the investigation of a plane crash caused by wake turbulence. As she was wrapping up this work her husband died of cancer in December 1956.
Katherine sang in the choir at Carver Memorial Presbyterian Church in Newport News, Virginia for 50 years. The minister there introduced James A. Johnson to her. He had been commissioned in 1951 as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army and was a veteran of the Korean War. In 1959, the two married. Both worked in the West Area Computing Section and in the Flight Research Division.
The 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik changed history, and changed Johnson’s life. In 1957, she provided some of the math for the 1958 document Notes on Space Technology, a compendium of a series of 1958 lectures given by engineers in the Flight Research Division and the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division. Engineers from those groups formed the core of the Space Task Group, the NACA’s first official foray into space travel. Johnson, who had worked with many of them since coming to Langley, “came along with the program” as the NACA became NASA later that year.
She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 mission Freedom 7, America’s first human spaceflight. In 1960, she and engineer Ted Skopinski coauthored Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position, a report laying out the equations describing an orbital spaceflight in which the landing position of the spacecraft is specified. It was the first time any woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report.
During her 35-year career at NASA and its predecessor, she earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computers to perform the tasks. The space agency noted her "historical role as one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist".
Johnson's work included calculating trajectories, launch windows, and emergency return paths for Project Mercury spaceflights, including those for other astronauts such as John Glenn, the first American in orbit, and rendezvous paths for the Apollo Lunar Module and command module on flights to the Moon.
Her calculations were essential to the beginning of the Space Shuttle program, and she worked on plans for a mission to Mars.
In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Johnson was called upon to do the work for which she would become most known. The complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network, linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers in the District of Columbia, Cape Canaveral, and Bermuda. The computers had been programmed to control trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission from liftoff to splashdown, but the astronauts were wary of putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts.
As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers 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.
When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, Johnson would talk about the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Module with the lunar-orbiting Command and Service Module.
She also worked on the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Technology Satellite and authored or coauthored 26 research reports.
She retired in 1986, after 33 years at Langley. “I loved going to work every single day,” she said. In 2015, at age 97, Johnson added another extraordinary achievement to her long list: President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.
She died on Feb. 24, 2020. NASA Administrator James Bridenstine said, "Our NASA family is sad to learn the news that Katherine Johnson passed away this morning at 101 years old. She was an American hero and her pioneering legacy will never be forgotten."
Just a few of Katherine Johnson’s Awards:
• 2019 Johnson awarded the Congressional Gold Medal
• 2018 West Virginia University, Morgantown, unveiled a life-size bronze statue of Katherine Johnson on campus and established a STEM scholarship in her name
• 2018 College of William and Mary awarded her an Honorary Doctorate Degree
• 2017 The Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility at NASA Langley in Hampton, Virginia opened and was named in her honor
• 2017 Daughters of the American Revolution Medal of Honor
• 2016 New York Times bestseller Hidden Figures, by Margot Lee Shetterly, profiled her life as a scholar, an educator, a “colored human computer,” and a research mathematician at NASA
• 2015 Presidential Medal of Freedom from then president Barack Obama
| Date Taken: | 03.26.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 04.27.2020 15:14 |
| Story ID: | 368575 |
| Location: | MARINE CORPS LOGISTICS BASE BARSTOW, CA, US |
| Web Views: | 175 |
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