Glenn’s earth orbit got a boost from a Black woman mathematician

By Frederick H. Lowe
Contributing Writer

(NorthStarNews Today) — Astronaut John Glenn, who was the first American to orbit the Earth, owed the success of his mission and his peace of mind to Katherine G. Johnson, a Black woman mathematician at NASA.

When it was Glenn’s turn to go into space, NASA had started using machines to make flight calculations, but Glenn did not trust the new technology. He insisted that Johnson check the results, according to the publication Mental Floss.

Katherine Johnson is a recipient of the Medal of Freedom. It was presented to her by President Barack Obama.

“You could do much more, much faster on a [machine] computer,” Johnson told Researcher News. “But when they went to [machine] computers, they called over and said, “Tell them to check and see if the computer trajectory they had calculated was correct. So I checked and it was correct.”

Astronaut Glenn, a former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate, died yesterday. He was 95.

Glenn was aboard Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962, carrying out the Mercury-Atlas 6 mission. Glenn circled the Earth three times in a flight lasting four hours, 55 minutes, and 23 seconds.

This article originally published in the December 12, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.