Hidden Figures: Mae Jemison
“I lived on the south side of Chicago, and I was a young girl who loved to stare up at the stars, I imagined myself going there.” - Mae Jemison
Mae Carol Jemison is a doctor, engineer and astronaut. Her eight-day space flight aboard the space shuttle Endeavour in 1992 established Jemison as the United States' first female African-American space traveler.
As a young girl growing up in the 1960’s Mae studied the Apollo program obsessively. Despite Mae’s passion for space travel, at university she decided to study engineering and medicine to become a biomedical engineer. During her medical studies she worked with the flying doctors in East Africa. The experience brought her closer to the stars, but she desired to be even closer.
Soon after Mae picked up the phone and called the NASA Johnson Space Centre requesting an application to be an astronaut and join the astronaut program. To Mae’s surprise the person on the other side of the phone didn’t laugh and she handed in her application shortly after.
When Mae applied to the astronaut program, she didn’t think about the fact whether I would be the first African-American woman in space. Mae just wanted to go into space, she said “I couldn’t have cared if there had been a thousand people in space before me or whether they had been none. I wanted to go.”
When Mae travelled to space to study how astronauts responded to gravity, she decided to take to space things that represented people who sometimes are not included.
Mae took with her:
_ A poster of Judith Jamison - an African American Ballet Dancer, performing the Dance Cry.
_ A Bundu statue, which was for the Women’s Society in West Africa.
_Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority flag. The sorority is the oldest African-American women sorority in the United States.
Being in space allowed Mae to feel very connected with the universe, ‘as much a part of this universe as any stars, any comet.”
Source: PBS LearningMedia
Mae Jemison features in Petit Pli's second comic, Mission 2: Earth’s Hidden Figures for LittleHumans, which highlights the importance and significance of the Black Lives Matter movement.
We hope our comic helps to nurture LittleHumans' innate curiosity and inspires them to never stop asking about Earth's hidden figures.
Hidden Figures: Katherine Johnson
“I counted everything. I counted steps on the road to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed. Anything which could be counted I did." - Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson was an African-American physicist, mathematician and a rocket scientist. She was born Katherine Coleman in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, USA in 1918.
Katherine was a brilliant student, who loved Maths and counted everything. Katherine’s thirst for knowledge allowed her to skip two grades to graduate from high school at age 14, and graduate from university at age 18 in 1953.
From 1953 to 1958, Kathrine worked in a segregated pool of mathematicians referred to as ‘computers with skirts’. However, because of her knowledge of analytical geometry, she was invited to participate in the previously all male editorial board her contributions. They were so important that, as she later said, they forgot to put her back in the pool.
In 1958, Katherine’s office became desegregated, but a glass ceiling remained. In the early days of NASA, women were not allowed to put their names on reports. As a result of her assertiveness, perseverance and the quality of her work, Katharine Johnson became the first woman in her division ever to have her name on a report. Not the first black woman.
During her time at NASA, Katherine was responsible for calculating the trajectory for the May 5th, 1961, space flight of Alan Shepard, the first American in space. She also calculated the launch window for his 1961 Mercury mission. She plotted backup navigational charts for astronauts in case of electronic failures when NASA used electronic computers for the first time to calculate John Glenn's orbit around the Earth; Glenn had asked for her specifically and had refused to fly unless Katherine verified the calculations!
Along with these achievements Katherine co-authored 26 scientific papers. And on May 5th, 2016, a new 40000 square foot building was named and dedicated to Katherine Johnson computational research facility at NASA's Langley Research Centre in Virginia, USA
Source: PBS LearningMedia
Katherine Johnson features in Petit Pli's second comic, Mission 2: Earth’s Hidden Figures for LittleHumans, which highlights the importance and significance of the Black Lives Matter movement.
We hope our comic helps to nurture LittleHumans' innate curiosity and inspires them to never stop asking about Earth's hidden figures.