Oct 08, 2020 · Born in 1918, Katherine Johnson was one of the first Black students to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools before becoming a NASA mathematician, where she helped send astronauts into ...
Nov 24, 2021 · Six unidentified scientists uses ladders and a large chalkboard to work out equations for satellite orbits at Systems Labs, California, 1957. Before the days of computers, employees at NASA would have to go about conveying their knowledge in a much more laborious way: chalk, board, and likely tears. The scientists used math and physics to calculate complex …
Sep 22, 2017 · Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin with the seismic experiment. Solar panels have deployed on the left and right and the antenna is pointed at Earth. The laser reflector is beyond the antenna and, in the distance, the TV camera is silhouetted against the black sky. The stereo close-up camera is near the righthand edge of this detail.
Jan 20, 2017 · To earn the new position, she had to take graduate-level courses after work hours, with special permission to sit in on the all-white classes. In 1958, she became NASA’s first black female engineer.
President Obama said at the time, "Katherine G. Johnson refused to be limited by society's expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity's reach.". NASA noted her "historical role as one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist.".
When NASA used electronic computers for the first time to calculate John Glenn 's orbit around Earth, officials called on Johnson to verify the computer's numbers; Glenn had asked for her specifically and had refused to fly unless Johnson verified the calculations.
Their main job was to read the data from the black boxes of planes and carry out other precise mathematical tasks. Then one day, Katherine (and a colleague) were temporarily assigned to help the all-male flight research team.
In August 2018, West Virginia State University established a STEM scholarship in honor of Johnson and erected a life-size statue of her on campus. Mattel announced a Barbie doll in Johnson's likeness with a NASA identity badge in 2018.
Katherine Johnson was born as Creola Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to Joylette Roberta (née Lowe) and Joshua McKinley Coleman. She was the youngest of four children.
Johnson accepted a job offer from the agency in June 1953. According to an oral history archived by the National Visionary Leadership Project: At first she [Johnson] worked in a pool of women performing math calculations. Katherine has referred to the women in the pool as virtual "computers who wore skirts".
NASA renamed the Independent Verification and Validation Facility, in Fairmont, West Virginia, to the Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility on February 22, 2019. Johnson was included on the BBC 's list of 100 Women of influence worldwide in 2016.
Six unidentified scientists uses a ladders and a large chalk board to work out equations for satellite orbits at Systems Labs, California, 1957. Before the days of computers, employees at NASA would have to go about conveying their knowledge in a much more laborious way: chalk, board, and likely tears. The scientists used math and physics ...
It was a job title, designating someone who performed mathematical equations and calculations by hand.
Apollo 11 Seismic Experiment. The Passive Seismic Experiment was the first seismometer placed on the Moon’s surface. It detected lunar "moonquakes" and provided information about the internal structure of the Moon.
Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin with the seismic experiment. Solar panels have deployed on the left and right and the antenna is pointed at Earth. The laser reflector is beyond the antenna and, in the distance, the TV camera is silhouetted against the black sky.
The Apollo 11 seismometer returned data for just three weeks but provided a useful first look at lunar seismology. More advanced seismometers were deployed at the Apollo 12, 14, 15, and 16 landing sites and transmitted data to Earth until September 1977.
Data regarding the strength, duration, and approximate direction of the seismic event were relayed to tracking stations on Earth. Because it was only powered by solar cells, the experiment only operated during the lunar days.
In 1949, Vaughan was made head of West Computing. Though it was segregated, Vaughan was nevertheless the first black woman to hold the position and the first black supervisor at NACA. She remained in the role until 1958, when the unit was shut down and NACA became NASA. On one hand, it was a victory for integration: Vaughan took a position working side-by-side with men and women of all races, programming the new electronic computers. On the other hand, Vaughan would never regain the rank she had held at West Computing, though she stayed with NASA until 1971, distinguishing herself as an expert FORTRAN programmer.
Over the years, Easley produced code that went on to be used in renewable energy research, including batteries for early hybrid vehicles, as well as for the high-thrust liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen Centaur rocket used to get space capsules into orbit.
As the prime aircraft test facility of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), Langley was racing to make combat planes fly further, faster, on less fuel. To process the deluge of data from wind tunnels and other experiments, Langley needed number crunchers. It found them in “ human computers ”.
As a mathematician and, later, an engineer at Langley, Mary Jackson worked on experimental supersonic aircraft, analysing how air flowed over every tiny feature, right down to the rivets. She also spent time in Langley’s wind tunnels, making painstaking adjustments to whittle down drag forces .
The film Hidden Figures, released in the US and UK in early 2017, focuses on their part in the race for space. Here are a few of their stories.
Miriam Mann started work as a Langley computer in 1943 , thinking she would stay only as long as the war effort required her. But the war came and went, and Mann stayed – unlike the sign in the cafeteria. It read “Colored Computers” and relegated the black women of West Computing to a lone rear table.
Annie Easley. NASA. Annie Easley started out as a computer at the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Hired in 1955, she became a programmer when computers became machines, honing her skills in programming languages like FORTRAN and SOAP.
In five years, Johnson became the only non-white, non-male member of the Space Task Force, charged with getting American astronauts into space as soon as possible. When that happened for the first time three years later, in 1961, Johnson 's calculations for Alan Shepard ’s capsule trajectory played a crucial role.
The building had no restroom facilities, Harris said. Such details are personal to Harris, because her grandmother, Miriam Daniel Mann, was one of the first black computers at Langley. A former math teacher, Mann worked for the lab until 1966, when illness forced her to retire.
A few years into the program, the unmarried white computers were housed in a fancy dorm. Meanwhile, the unmarried black computers had to find lodging in town, which wasn’t always easy. The lab was even on the site of a former plantation. Despite the systematic discrimination, these mathematicians kept calculating. NASA.
That year, FDR signed an order to hire more African-American workers, and two years later, in 1943, Langley started hiring college-educated black women with a background in math and chemistry.
It's a collaboration between Harris, recent Macalester grad Lucy Short, and Margot Lee Shetterly , researcher and author of Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped the United States Win the Space Race.
NASA. “They’re more resilient than I could imagine,” said Duchess Harris, an American Studies professor at Macalester College in Minnesota who is part of the “Human Computer Project,” which launched last year.
Johnson was just one of dozens of mathematically talented black women recruited to work as “human computers” at the Langley Memorial Research Laboratory in the ‘40s and ‘50s. (Many of whom, including Johnson, are the subject of Theodore Melfi's Oscar-nominated film, Hidden Figures .)
Aprille Joy Ericsson '86 graduated from MIT months after Ronald E. McNair lost his life aboard the Challenger. The first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in engineering at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Ericsson has had a lifelong career at NASA.
In 2005 Kwatsi Alibaruho '94 became NASA's first black Mission Control flight director on duty, a position then occupied by only 58 people since the beginning of the American space program.
The professorship is a rotating position for a NASA scientist or engineer to teach and conduct research for at least a year at MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Funding for the professorship comes both from NASA and MIT, which work together to select candidates for the position.
MIT-educated engineers and scientists played a vital role within NASA and its contractors to execute a wide variety of tasks necessary to achieve the national goal of landing on the moon. An Instrumentation Lab engineer inspects a mockup of the Apollo spacecraft guidance system, the early 1960s.
That's because the loss of bone mass is a serious issue for astronauts the longer they travel. Satcher's work at the forefront of orthopedic oncology was a good fit with NASA's high-priority research on microgravity and the musculoskeletal system.
At 22 years old, she is already a Rocket Structural Design and Analysis Engineer for the Space Launch System being built by Boeing for NASA. The MIT senior designs analyzes parts of a rocket she believes will be one of the biggest and most powerful in history. Guinn is set to graduate from MIT with a 5.0 in 2017.
MIT's role in helping to create NASA includes stories of a black experience that add a unique dimension to space exploration and research. In 1962, MIT's Lincoln Laboratory transmitted the first television picture, displaying the initials "M.I.T." via NASA's Echo I balloon communications satellite. The signal was bounced 2,700 miles across ...
There, Johnson performed the NASA calculations that made possible the manned space missions of the early 1960s as well as the 1969 moon landing. Even astronaut John Glenn put his full faith in Johnson, requesting she re-do all-electronic computer calculations before he embarked on his 1962 Earth orbits.
Dr. Alexa Canady. In 1984, Alexa Canady , a cum laude graduate of the University of Michigan's medical school, became the first African American woman to be certified by the American Board of Neurological Surgery.
On September 12, 1992 , Jemison, along with six other astronauts, launched into space aboard the Endeavour, and with that earned the distinction of the first African American woman in space as well. During her eight-day mission, Jemison conducted experiments on weightlessness and motion sickness.
Mary Jackson poses for a photo at work at NASA Langley Research Center in 1977. Photo: Bob Nye/NASA/Donaldson Collection/Getty Images. Mary Jackson began working under Vaughan's supervision in the segregated West Area Computing section as a computer in 1951.
Just weeks after Katherine Johnson began a position as one of Langley Research Center's human computers in 1952 , supervisors transferred the summa cum laude West Virginia State College graduate (with degrees in both mathematics and French) from the African American computing pool to the flight research division.
NASA scientists including Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson began to get some overdue credit, however, when author Margot Lee Shetterly released her 2016 tome, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race .
Mae Jemison. Photo: SSPL/Getty Images. Mae Jemison was a woman with many firsts to her credit. She was working in the medical field as a General Practitioner and attending graduate engineering classes in Los Angeles when NASA admitted her to its astronaut training program in June 1987.