Science · Engineering & invention
Katherine Johnson
NASA mathematician of orbital flight
Also known as Katherine G. Johnson · Katherine Goble Johnson
Photograph · Image credit
Who they are
Katherine Johnson worked on the mathematics of spaceflight at Langley, including trajectory analysis and checks of orbital calculations. She coauthored a 1960 report with Ted Skopinski and independently checked the programmed equations for John Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission. Her work combined theoretical relationships with the practical verification needed for human flight.
She represents the mathematical and human verification underlying the early space program.
Selected contributions
Selected works
Report · 1960
Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position
Skopinski and Johnson develop a method for choosing a satellite’s launch-direction conditions so it will pass over a selected point on Earth. The summary explains how the method accounts for Earth’s rotation and tests corrections for its non-spherical shape.
Reading scope & citation
Fresh cover, author/date, summary and introduction read; calculations not independently reproduced.
In the timeline
Biography sources & portrait credit
- Katherine Johnson Biography ↗NASA Langley Research Center
- Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position ↗NASA, Technical Note D-233
Portrait credit
NASA. Public domain (U.S. federal government work). Via Wikimedia Commons.
Photograph. Cropped to 4:5, resized to 320 × 400 and converted to WebP.
Image source & identification ↗ · Public domain (U.S. federal government work) ↗
