11/1/2022 0 Comments Katherine johnson nasa missions![]() ![]() By age 10, Johnson was already in high school. She started elementary school at the age of 5 but had to be moved into more advanced classes twice. Johnson’s remarkable intelligence became apparent at a young age. Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) was well-known for her aeronautics work at NASA, where she developed calculations that helped the US launch its first astronaut into space in 1961 and safely land Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969, among other pioneering crewed space missions. Sometimes they have more imagination than men.” Katherine Johnson “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.“Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing. As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”-Katherine 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. The computers had been programmed with the orbital equations that would control the trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission, from blast off 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. 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 Washington, DC, Cape Canaveral, and Bermuda. In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Katherine Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. It was the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report. 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. She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 mission Freedom 7, America’s first human spaceflight. Engineers from those groups formed the core of the Space Task Group, the NACA’s first official foray into space travel, and Katherine, who had worked with many of them since coming to Langley, “came along with the program” as the NACA became NASA later that year. Katherine johnson nasa missions series#In 1957, Katherine 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 (PARD). The 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik changed history-and Katherine Johnson’s life. As she was wrapping up this work her husband died of cancer in December 1956. She spent the next four years analyzing data from flight test, and worked on the investigation of a plane crash caused by wake turbulence. ![]() Just two weeks into Katherine’s 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. Katherine and her husband, James Goble, decided to move the family to Newport News to pursue the opportunity, and Katherine began work at Langley in the summer of 1953. She 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. ![]() At the end of the first session, however, she decided to leave school to start a family with her husband. Katherine left her teaching job, and enrolled in the graduate math program. Davis selected Katherine and two male students as the first black students to be offered spots at the state’s flagship school, West Virginia University. When West Virginia decided to quietly integrate its graduate schools in 1939, West Virginia State’s president Dr. ![]()
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