| Katherine G. Johnson |
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Katherine G. Johnson was born: August 26th, 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Katherine is a Physicist, Space Scientist and Mathematician Ms. Johnson has worked with the tracking teams of manned and unmanned orbital missions for NASA. At the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia she is an Aerospace Technologist. She trained in West Virginia as a mathematician and physicist and has worked on space navigation, the orbits of spacecraft, interplanetary trajectories and the challenging problems therein. Spacecrafts Johnson has worked on include the Earth Resources Satellite, which has helped locate underground minerals and other earth resources. Johnson analyzed data on lunar orbital missions, the Apollo moon missions, gathered by tracking stations around the world. She has studied new navigation procedures in order to determine better ways to track the manned and unmanned space missions and her pioneering research in navigational problems has earned her the Group Achievement Award presented to NASA's Lunar Spacecraft and Operations team. NASA Mission Control Specialists had to know exactly where the spacecraft was at all times during moon flights, relative to the gravitational tugs of Earth, the Sun and the Moon. They had to tell the crew when to fire rockets for altitude changes or for reentry and for many missions NASAs human computer, prior to mechanical devices performing the role, was Johnson, the West Virginia State mathematician who coauthored the early reports on plotting spacecraft trajectories and calculating orbital flights in relation to points on Earth, and locating the orbiting craft. Ms. Johnson Awards are as follows: * Recipient of the Group Achievement Award, NASA's Lunar Spacecraft and Operations. * Honorary Doctor of Laws from the State University of New York in Farmingdale in 1998 * West Virginia State College -- Outstanding Alumnus of the Year (1999) |
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