Hello, my name is Caroline Bowman and I am a student working at Margaret B. Pollard Middle School in Chapel Hill North Carolina. I am writing to inform you about a space worker, Katherine Goble Johnson. The information below contains details about Biography, the Legacy and importance, and how they are important today.
To begin, Katherine Goble Johnson was born August 26, 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia and is still alive today. Katherine was a very fascinating child, she was obsessed with numbers and would count everything around her. She counted how many steps it took to get to the road, or how many steps were on the stairs at church. She loved math and was very smart. She started high school at 10 and graduated college when she was 18. Katherine majored in French and Math. One of her favorite subjects was geometry (Source #2). She heard that NACA (NASA) was hiring african american women to do math (they were called computers) . She applied but found out that all of the positions were filled. She applied again a year later and got in and began to work with a large group of women. All in all, Katherine’s childhood gave her a head start in her career with all of her achievements and degrees.
Katherine Johnson was such an amazing women that they made a movie about her and two friends of hers, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. This movie really brought Katherine into the spotlight and introduced her story. What Katherine is most known for is her calculations for John Glenn’s orbit around the moon. As part of the protocol for the mission, before take-off, Glenn asked to “get the girl” Katherine, to run the numbers all over again and make sure they were correct. According to the NASA website, “As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Katherine Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space.” (source 1) This information is important because the information sites all of her important missions and parts of missions she has been apart of. In conclusion, Katherine Johnson has made a legacy in the space era by not only being a women joining the workforce, but a African-American one. She is a true inspiration for children everywhere. Even the toy company Mattel made a barbie after her honoring her success and impact today.
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To conclude, Katherine Goble Johnson is important to be aware of and informed about because of three reasons. First, because of all of Katherine’s hard work and dedication to her job, she received the Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2015. The space company NASA, named a building in her honor- the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. At the ceremony, they presented her with the Space Flight Awareness Silver Snoopy award. The Silver Snoopy award goes to those who have made outstanding contributions to human spaceflight safety.
All in all, thank you for allowing me to inform you about Katherine Goble Johnson with you. Katherine Goble Johnson is important for you about when making decisions on how NASA’s funds and research time will be used in the future. The reliable sources I used are The NASA website, and Encyclopedia Britannica. Thank you again for taking the time to consider the research and information I have collected about Katherine Goble Johnson. Please feel free to contact me for any other necessary information.
