Katherine Johnson (1918-2020, front row, second from right), US physicist and mathematician, with colleagues from NASA's Stability and Control branch at Langley Research Center, Virginia, USA. Johnson started work at NACA (the predecessor to NASA) as a human computer. During her career, she worked on Project Mercury and the Apollo programme. NASA and NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) used human computers in aerospace and flight research to transcribe and handle raw data. As technology progressed, both human and electronic computers were used to process and handle data. Photographed in 1983.