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Katherine Johnson Biography - NASA

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78 views4 pages

Katherine Johnson Biography - NASA

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ar13992
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From Hidden to Modern Figures 

Katherine Johnson Biography

(/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/26646856911_ca242812ee_o_1.jpg)
Portrait of Katherine Johnson
Credits: NASA
Born: Aug. 26, 1918
Died: Feb. 24, 2020
Hometown: White Sulphur Springs, WV
Education: B.S., Mathematics and French, West Virginia State College, 1937
Hired by NACA: June 1953
Retired from NASA: 1986
Actress Playing Role in Hidden Figures: Taraji P. Henson

Biography by Margot Lee Shetterly

Being handpicked to be one of three black students to integrate West Virginia’s graduate
schools is something that many people would consider one of their life’s most notable
moments, but it’s just one of several breakthroughs that have marked Katherine Johnson’s
long and remarkable life. Born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918, her intense
curiosity and brilliance with numbers vaulted her ahead several grades in school. By 13,
she was attending the high school on the campus of historically black West Virginia State
College. At 18, she enrolled in the college itself, where she made quick work of the
school’s math curriculum and found a mentor in math professor W. W. Schieffelin Claytor,
the third African American to earn a PhD in mathematics. She graduated with highest
honors in 1937 and took a job teaching at a black public school in Virginia.

More stories on Katherine Johnson (https://www.nasa.gov/langley/katherine-johnson)

When West Virginia decided to quietly integrate its graduate schools in 1939, West Virginia
State’s president, Dr. John W. Davis, selected her and two men to be the first black
students offered spots at the state’s flagship school, West Virginia University. She left her
teaching job and enrolled in the graduate math program. At the end of the first session,
however, she decided to leave school to start a family with her first husband, James
Goble. 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. 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.
The 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik changed history—and Johnson’s life. In
1957, she provided some of the math for the 1958 document Notes on Space Technology
(https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19740074640.pdf), a compendium
of a series of 1958 lectures given by engineers in the Flight Research Division and the
Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD). 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 (https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/liftoff-of-alan-
shepards-freedom-7-mission), 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
(https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19980227091.pdf), 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 a woman in the Flight Research Division had
received credit as an author of a research report.

In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Johnson was called
upon to do the work that she would become most known for. 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, Cape Canaveral in
Florida, and Bermuda. The computers had been programmed with the orbital equations
that would control the 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. (/multimedia/nasatv/index.html)
(/) NASA TV
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 (ERTS, later renamed Landsat) 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."

(/)

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