#KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA COMPUTER HOW TO#
#KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA COMPUTER MOVIE#

She attended the 2017 Oscars when the movie was nominated, escorted to the stage by NASA astronaut Yvonne Cagle and received a standing ovation. In 2016, the book and subsequent movie вЂњ Hidden FiguresвЂќ highlighted JohnsonвЂ™s story and those of her colleagues in the West Computing section, bringing recognition of her achievements to the wider public. In 2015, at age 97, former US President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, AmericaвЂ™s highest civilian honor, and in September 2017, she was honored by NASA with the dedication of a new research building named after her.

Johnson has received a number of awards and honorary degrees for her pioneering work, including five NASA Langley Research Center Special Achievement awards. After 33 years, she retired from NASA in 1986. She later worked on the Space Shuttle program, Earth Resources Satellite, and even contributed to plans for a Mars mission. Using JohnsonвЂ™s earlier research on backup parameters and navigational charts, Houston was able to compute the correct trajectories which enabled the crew to safely return to Earth.

#KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA COMPUTER HOW TO#

As oxygen began to run out, ground controllers in Houston were faced with a formidable task: how to get the astronauts home. Two days in, the mission was aborted when a secondary oxygen tank blew up, causing the main oxygen tank to fail. These ended up being instrumental during the Apollo 13 mission, the third lunar landing attempt which took place in 1970. Johnson also completed the same calculations as well as backup navigational charts for the astronauts in case of electronic failure for Apollo 11, which sent three men to the Moon. into space, and the following year she verified computer calculations for the Friendship 7 mission in which John Glenn became the first U.S. In 1961, she calculated the path for Freedom 7, the spacecraft that carried the first American astronaut, Alan B. Johnson transitioned onto this project, co-authoring a report in 1960 titled вЂњ Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth PositionвЂњ, along with Ted Skopinski, in which they outlined the math required for orbital spaceflight and in which the landing position of the spacecraft is specified - the first report from the Flight Research Division in which a female was given credit. In 1958, after NACA was reformulated into NASA, the Space Task group was formed with the goal of also getting a human into space. But this would take some time, as their Cold War rivals achieved another space вЂњfirstвЂќ in April of 1961, when the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel to space, completing one orbit of the Earth in the Vostok 1 capsule another significant milestone in the Space Race. The launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 in 1957 made history and the United States hurried to catch up. After two weeks, Johnson left the pool of computers to join the flight research division where she analyzed data from flight tests. The West computing section was comprised of a group of African American women who manually carried out complex mathematical calculations and data analysis for NASAвЂ™s various teams. The Langley office was still segregated at the time, and Johnson therefore worked as a computer in the West Computing section, which was headed by Dorothy Vaughan - fellow trail blazer, mathematician, and computer programmer who became NASAвЂ™s first African American supervisor in 1949. It wasnвЂ™t until 1953 that she joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) Langley laboratory, which would later become the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Some biographical sources indicate that the environment at West Virginia University was less welcoming, and she found it difficult to continue with her studies as a research mathematician. This in itself is a trail blazing, once in a lifetime accomplishment, but Johnson was only getting started.ДЄfter her first session, she decided to leave school to start a family with her husband, eventually returning to teaching public school students. In 1939, when West Virginia College became an integrated school, she was hand-picked along with two other male students to be the first African American students to enroll in the universityвЂ™s graduate program, studying mathematics. in mathematics, and graduated summa cum laude at the age of 18. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a Ph.D. She later attended West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University) where she studied mathematics under the mentorship of Professor W. Her family relocated to Institute, West Virginia when the time came for her to attend high school, as White Sulfur Springs did not have an African American high school. Katherine Johnson at her desk at NASA Langley Research Center in 1962.

Katherine johnson nasa computer