Katherine Johnson Coloring Page

Katherine Johnson was born in 1918 in West Virginia and was so good at math that she finished college at 18. She began working for NASA's earlier group, called the NACA, in 1953, doing flight calculations by hand. Her math helped plot the path of Alan Shepard's 1961 flight, the first American in space.

In 1962 astronaut John Glenn was getting ready to orbit the Earth, and he asked her to double-check the numbers from the new electronic computers by hand. She also helped with the Apollo missions to the Moon, and in 2015 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A book and a movie called Hidden Figures tell the story of her and her coworkers.