NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced the death of Katherine Johnson, a mathematician, and a history-maker on Monday.
She calculated the flight path for the United States' first-ever crewed space mission and of course, the moon landing, and she was one of the three women who were profiled in the book and later movie 'Hidden Figures'. She was 101.
She was one of the breaking-barrier NASA Mathematicians
According to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, "Johnson helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space even as she made huge strides that also opened doors for women and people of color in the universal human quest to explore space,"
Born in 1918, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, her extreme curiosity and excellence with numbers, boosted her ahead several grades in school. By the age of 13, she was already attending high school in West Virginia State College. At 18, she enrolled herself in the college itself, where then she found a mentor with the school's math professor W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, which was the third African American in history to earn a PhD in mathematics. She then had graduated with highest honors in 1937 and took a job at a black public school in Virginia in teaching.
She helped calculate Apollo 11's flight to the moon and was depicted in 'Hidden Figures'
Johnson used her brilliance in computing skills to move up the NASA chain. She then had hand-computed the trajectory of the first manned launch and continued to be important to the astronauts. She did calculations for the first moon landing, and later also helped with the space shuttle program.
She was portrayed by actress Taraji P. Henson, alongside Octavia Spencer as the mathematician Dorothy Vaughan and Janelle Monáe as the engineer Mary Jackson, in a movie about three revolutionary black women whose work at NASA was essential during the space race which then became an Oscar-nominated 2016 film. Jackson died in 2005, and Vaughan died in 2008.
Apollo 11
With the help of Katherine Johnson's calculations, Apollo 11 was the first spaceflight that landed humans on the moon under the crew led by Commander Niel Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin in July 20, 1969.
A three-stage 363-foot rocket will use its 7.5 million pounds of thrust to propel them into space and into history. The astronauts were given objectives such as scientific exploration by the lunar module, deployment of a TV camera to transmit signals to Earth, deployment of a solar wind composition experiment, seismic experiment package and a Laser Ranging Retroreflector.
The astronauts returned to Earth with the first-ever samples from another planet. Apollo 11 achieved its primary mission which was to perform a manned lunar landing and return the mission safely to Earth which helped pave the way for the Apollo lunar landing missions to follow.
at a White House ceremony in 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Johnson the nation's highest civilian honor, dubbed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, "In her 33 years at NASA, Katherine was a pioneer who broke the barriers of race and gender, showing generations of young people that everyone can excel in math and science, and reach for the stars," Obama said.
