#Katherine johnson nasa challenger how to#
#Katherine johnson nasa challenger movie#

She did this work to prepare for Astronaut John Glenn’s historic 1962 mission when he became the first American to orbit the globe.

She had to take a landing zone for an orbiting spacecraft, and calculate backwards: figuring out the math for how the spacecraft would arrive there. In orbit, not only is the spacecraft moving at 17,000 mph, the Earth below is also moving, rotating on its axis. Katherine Johnson at NASA’s Langley Research Center in 1980. Orbit - having the spacecraft encircle the Earth - is harder. Flying, essentially, in a simple parabolic arc. Shepard visited space, but he was not put into orbit around the Earth. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I’ll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.’ That was my forte.”Īnd so, she calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard’s historic 1961 flight that put the first American in space, and landed him in the Atlantic Ocean.īut greater challenges were to come. She best explained her job in her own words: “Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start,” Johnson said in a 2008 NASA interview. Johnson’s math enabled that choreography. The missions to send humans to space and back had to be precise and choreographed. This means that Johnson needed to calculate the entire trajectory of the flight - where it started, how fast it went, and where it would land. Were an astronaut to touch down in a desolate corner of the ocean, without any land in sight, it could presumably take days to be rescued (if rescued at all). One of the trickiest bits: the spacecraft couldn’t just land anywhere. But equally hard was getting that human to land safely back on Earth.

#Katherine johnson nasa challenger how to#

In the 1960s, NASA had figured out how to launch a human being aboard a rocket into space. She figured out how to get spacecraft there. Here’s what she did, and why she’ll be remembered for a long time. As Bill Barry, NASA’s chief historian, told the Washington Post in an obituary: “If we go back to the moon, or to Mars, we’ll be using her math.”

#Katherine johnson nasa challenger movie#

She was also a pioneer in that her work helped put humans in space, and returned them safely home to Earth.īefore rising to pop-culture fame with the book and movie Hidden Figures, before being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Johnson created and calculated some extremely important equations to make America’s adventures in spaceflight successful. Katherine Johnson, who died Monday at age 101, was a pioneer in many ways: She was an early employee of NASA (and even worked at the agency that predated it), and an African American woman working in a field hugely dominated by white men.