Katherine Johnson
The Orbital Mathematician
The trajectory calculations behind Mercury and Apollo
Rating
92Impact score
Domains
Orbital mechanicsNumerical analysisSpaceflight
Scouting report
Computed trajectories for Alan Shepard’s flight and the Apollo missions at NASA Langley. When the agency moved to electronic computers for John Glenn’s orbit, Glenn asked for her to check the machine’s numbers by hand before he would fly. Co-authored a 1960 report on orbital calculation, unusual for a woman at Langley then.
Curator’s note
The astronaut trusted her arithmetic over the computer, and he was not wrong to.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Katherine Johnson by NASA, licensed Public domain.
Sources
- 01Katherine Johnson en.wikipedia.org
- 02NASA biography nasa.gov