On 24 February 2020, Johnson died aged 101 years. In February 2019, NASA also dedicated a facility in her honour, the „ Independent Verification and Validation Facility“ in Fairmont, West Virginia. In 2017, NASA named the " Katherine Johnson Computational Research Facility" in Langley after her. In 2015, Katherine Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, for her contribution to the moon landing and her lifetime achievement for NASA. Until her retirement in 1986, Johnson was also instrumental in the Sky Lab and Space Shuttle programmes. At the time, she was the only woman to make the move from the computer centre to another department.ĭuring the failed Apollo 13 mission, which had to return to Earth unplanned after the explosion of a fuel tank, Katherine Johnson helped calculate the return flight. Johnson, a black woman, had a doubly hard time, but she persevered, kept asking questions and impressed with her mathematical skills. The USA were intensifying efforts to catch up with the Soviets in space travel, creating opportunities for talented minds. In 1957, the “Sputnik” shock changed the American space flight research – and Johnson’s life. For several years she was primarily analysing flight data. First she worked as a teacher, then she spent some time at home to focus on her three daughters and, in 1953, began working at the NACA’s West Area Computing Unit, where Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan were also employed. She was born in White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia in 1918 and studied French and mathematics (after skipping several classes at school).
KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA JOB MOVIE
The most famous among the NASA women scientists of African-American origin, who gained belated fame through the movie “Hidden Figures”, was Katherine G. Katherine Johnson at the opening of the NASA Computational Research Facility named after her, in 2017 Mathematics genius and NASA icon
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