Katherine johnson nasa images movie#

She retired from NASA in 1986.As recognized through the book and movie Hidden Figures, Katherine Johnson was one of the first African American women to work at NASA as a human computer. Born in 1918, she attended a two-room school in West Virginia. She excelled at school and skipped ahead several grades.

Johnson later worked on the space shuttle program. Johnson was also part of the team that calculated where and when to launch the rocket for the Apollo 11 mission of 1969, which sent the first three men to the Moon. He asked to have Johnson double check the computer’s calculations. However, before Glenn left the ground, he wanted to make sure that the electronic computer had planned his flight correctly. By that time, NASA had begun to use electronic computers. In 1962, on a later Mercury flight, John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. It was the first mission of NASA’s Mercury program of crewed spaceflights. Alan Shepard made the historic 15-minute flight in the craft. In 1961 Johnson calculated the path for Freedom 7, the spacecraft that put the first U.S astronaut in space. Johnson authored or coauthored 26 research reports during her career. It was the first time a woman in her division received credit as an author of a research report. In 1960 she coauthored a paper with one of the group’s engineers about calculations for placing a spacecraft into orbit. That changed when NACA became NASA in 1958.Īt NASA Johnson was a member of the Space Task Group. They were forced to use separate bathrooms and dining facilities.

The West Computers were segregated from the space agency’s white workers. They analyzed test data and provided mathematical computations that were essential to the success of the U.S. The women were called “computers.” Johnson was part of a group of African American women known as the West Computers. Before electronic computers came into use, the space program relied on groups of women who manually performed complex mathematical calculations for the program’s engineers. NACA was the predecessor of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In 1953 she began working at the West Area Computing unit of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). (She later married James Johnson.) Career

She studied math there but soon left to take care of her family. In 1939 Coleman was selected to be one of the first three African American students to enroll in a graduate program at West Virginia University, at Morgantown. After graduation she moved to Virginia to take a teaching job. She earned bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and French. In 1937, at age 18, Coleman graduated from West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University), at Institute, with the highest honors. By the time she was 10 years old, she had started attending high school. Her intelligence and skill with numbers became obvious when she was a child. She was born Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Her work helped send astronauts to the Moon. space program, American mathematician Katherine Johnson calculated and analyzed the flight paths of many spacecraft. During her long career working for the U.S.

Katherine johnson nasa images