The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Katherine Johnson dies, the scientist who helped humanity reach the moon

2020-02-24T19:48:46.112Z


African-American mathematics, which inspired the movie 'Hidden Figures', pioneered NASA's special missions


MORE INFORMATION

  • The secret weapon of the United States in the space race
  • The three black mathematics that beat 'La La Land'

"You tell me when and where you want the ship to land, and I will tell you where, when and how to launch it," said scientist Katherine Johnson (West Virginia, 1918) once. NASA has reported on Monday that "the brilliant mind" of its team, fundamental in the arrival of humanity to the Moon, has died at 101. The space agency honors its legacy that broke down racial and social barriers in "a time when computers wore skirts," as he used to say. The double discrimination she suffered for decades as a woman and African American and her hard work was immortalized in the three-time Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures (2016). The film was not awarded any awards, but Johnson was acclaimed by the public when he took the stage during the awards ceremony.

Behind the historic landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon, one of the figures that led the United States to victory in the space race with the Soviet Union (USSR), was Johnson. He worked more than fourteen hours a day on the mission return program, known as Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. "I had done the calculations and I knew they were correct, but it was like driving this morning, anything could happen," he said at the time in an interview published by NASA.

Johnson was a pioneer. In the first years of NASA's existence, when it was still the National Aeronautics Advisory Committee, it calculated by hand the trajectories of the rockets and the Earth's orbits. He used calculation rules, graph paper and desktop calculating machines. Until 1958, she and other African-American scientists worked in a computer office separate from whites. They also used another dining room and other bathrooms in what is now known as the Langley Research Center located in Hampton, Virginia. From there he analyzed in the sixties the trajectory for the Redstone 3 mission of Alan Shepard, the first to take an American into space. He also manually verified the calculations of an unpublished NASA computer, an IBM 7090, that traced John Glenn's orbits around the planet. Despite her feats, virtually no one knew her name or recognized her for her work.

"Katherine Johnson refused to be limited by society's expectations about her gender and race, while extending the limits of humanity's reach," were the words of President Barack Obama when in 2015 he hung up at the White House. Medal of Freedom, highest civil honor of the United States. It was not the only tribute that the space scientist could value in life. In 2017, NASA baptized one of its buildings under the name of the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Center. "The NASA family will never forget Katherine Johnson's courage and the milestones we could not have achieved without her," said Jim Bridenstine, agency director. "His story and his talent continue to inspire the world."

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-02-24

You may like

News/Politics 2024-02-15T11:41:39.402Z

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-27T16:45:54.081Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.