His calculations allowed the United States to conquer the Moon. American mathematician Katherine Johnson died at the age of 101, according to a NASA announcement on Monday.
The career of this great black American figure had inspired the film "The Shadow Figures", released in 2016. Adapted from the book by Margot Lee Shetterly, this feature film named three times at the Oscars recounts the too often overlooked contribution of black women in the American conquest of space.
The scientist had remained relatively unknown until President Barack Obama awarded her in 2015 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the highest civilian distinctions in the United States.
A graduate in mathematics, Katherine Johnson joined the American space program - the future Nasa - in 1953, and had the main task of controlling the work of her superiors using calculations.
Kept away from white colleagues
At that time, racial segregation was still in effect in the United States, and Katherine Johnson worked as a "Colored computer" with dozens of other black mathematicians, far from their white colleagues.
It was only in 1958 that his team was integrated into other NASA divisions, to be part of the first manned space flight program in the United States. Katherine Johnson then participated in the calculations for the flight of Alan Shepard, the first American to go into space.
During her three-decade career with the space agency, she developed crucial equations that enabled the United States to send astronauts into orbit and to the Moon, formulas still used in contemporary aerospace science.
"Heroine"
In particular, she calculated the trajectories of Apollo 11, the historic mission that made Neil Armstrong the first man to walk on the Moon in 1969.
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NASA paid tribute to the scientist on Monday. "She was an American heroine, a pioneer whose heritage will never be forgotten," writes James Bridenstine, the head of the American space agency. Katherine Johnson has made it possible “to eliminate racial and gender-related barriers”, for her part hails the NAACP, the largest black defense organization in the United States.
