It was at West Virginia State that she found a mentor in Professor W. At 13, she was attending the high school located on the campus of the historically black West Virginia State College, and enrolled there for undergraduate studies at 18. She was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918 and skipped several grades due to her "intense curiosity and brilliance with numbers," her NASA profile says. “I loved going to work every single day,” Johnson said at the time. Johnson worked for NASA for more than three decades, retiring in 1986. She also worked on both the space shuttle and the Earth Resources Satellite programs, in addition to authoring or coauthoring 26 research reports. "Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space," NASA says. “If she says they’re good,’” Johnson remembered Glenn saying, “then I’m ready to go.” So Glenn asked engineers to "get the girl," referring to Johnson, to run the computer equations by hand. The 1962 flight required the construction of a "worldwide communications network" linking tracking stations around the world to computers in Washington, D.C., Cape Canaveral and Bermuda.īut astronauts weren't keen on "putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts," according to NASA. She was also known for work that greatly contributed to the first American orbital spaceflight, piloted by John Glenn. She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s 1961 mission Freedom 7, which was America’s first human spaceflight, according to NASA. She was also the first woman in the Flight Research Division to receive credit as an author of a research report for her work with Ted Skopinski on detailing the equations describing an orbital spaceflight. She said her greatest contribution to space exploration was making "the calculations that helped sync Project Apollo’s Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module." In other words, helping to put men on the moon in 1969. Johnson began working at NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in 1953 at the Langley Laboratory in Virginia. Jackson died in 2005, and Vaughan died in 2008. The work of the women altered the country's history but their names were largely unknown until the movie received acclaim. In 2015, Johnson was awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.The film also stars Octavia Spencer as the mathematician Dorothy Vaughan and Janelle Monáe as the engineer Mary Jackson. Johnson’s story-along with those of Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughn, two other female African-American mathematicians working at NASA at the same time-was the basis for 2016 film Hidden Figures, in which she was portrayed by Taraji P. Her work was so trusted that astronaut John Glenn requested that she double check the computer’s calculations by hand before he became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962. During her time at the space agency, her calculations of orbital mechanics-including trajectories, launch windows, and emergency return and rendezvous paths-were vital to the success of the first crewed space flights. Johnson, who passed away last February at the age of 101, spent 33 years working at NASA as a mathematician. Volcon’s Latest EV is an Off-Road-Conquering UTV That Can Hit a Top Speed of 80 MPH Ferrari Just Teased Its New Le Mans HypercarĪ Used Hummer EV Was Just Auctioned for $324,500-Nearly 3 Times Its Retail Price
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