“Getting to the lunar South Pole is a much trickier trajectory problem,” says Gruber. The Apollo missions went to lower latitudes, closer to the lunar equator-a much more direct path from Earth. The team plans to send the astronauts to the south lunar pole, where orbiters have discovered the existence of water in the form of ice. Thanks to faster computers, the Artemis team can now design more complex trajectories through space to more interesting locations on the moon. “We can evaluate a lot more options a lot more quickly,” says Gruber. Today, NASA scientists eschew hand calculations almost entirely, relying on computers for fast, consistent performance. He safely reentered Earth’s atmosphere and landed about 40 miles away from Johnson’s calculated target in the Atlantic Ocean-remarkably close, considering that his spacecraft was moving up to 5 miles per second. Gruber’s basic task remains essentially the same as Johnson’s was in 1962: to calculate the speed, acceleration, and direction required to lob a spacecraft of certain size and fuel capacity to hit a moving target, without a lot of room for extra maneuvering.įollowing her confirmation of the computer’s numbers, Glenn would orbit the planet three times. Gruber plans trajectories for Artemis, just as Johnson did for the first lunar landing. “She had a big contribution to trajectory design in general,” says NASA aerospace engineer Jenny Gruber.Īt NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Gruber works on the Artemis mission, which plans to send the first woman and the next man to the moon in 2024. Her work forms part of the mathematical foundation of NASA’s missions today. But Johnson’s contributions to spaceflight extend beyond such historic moments, several of which are dramatized in the 2016 movie Hidden Figures. The retired NASA mathematician, who died Monday at the age of 101, calculated the trajectories of the agency’s first space missions, including John Glenn’s 1962 spaceflight in which he became the first American to orbit the planet, and the first moon landing in 1969. Her math continues to carve out new paths for spacecraft navigating our solar system, as NASA engineers use evolved versions of her equations that will execute missions to the moon and beyond. Katherine Johnson blazed trails, not just as a black female mathematician during the Cold War, but by mapping literal paths through outer space.
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