经济学人下载:数学家凯瑟琳·戈布尔·约翰逊(3)

As NASA's focus turned from supersonic flight to flights in space, she was therefore deeply involved, though still behind the scenes. This excited her, because if her first love was mathematics—counting everything as a child, from plates to silverware to the number of steps to the church—her second was astronomy, and the uncountable stars. A celestial globe now joined the calculator on her desk. She had to plot the trajectories of spacecraft, developing the launch window and making sure—as soon as humans took off—that the module could get back safely. 

随着美国国家航空航天局的工作重点从超音速飞行转向太空飞行，尽管凯瑟琳仍在幕后工作，但她也因此深深参与其中。这让她很兴奋，因为她的初恋是数学——在她还是个孩子的时候就不停地计算，从盘子到银器，从台阶数到教堂——她第二喜欢的是天文学，还有数不清的星星。这时，她桌上除计算器外又多了一个天球仪。凯瑟琳需要绘制航天器的轨迹， 开发发射窗口并确保一旦人类起飞，该航天器能安全返回。

This involved dozens of equations to calculate, at each moment, which bit of earth the spacecraft was passing over, making allowances for the tilt of the craft and the rotation of the planet. She ensured that Alan Shepard's mercury capsule splashed down where it could be found quickly in 1961, and that John Glenn in 1962 could return safely from his first orbits of the earth. Indeed, until "the girl", as he called her (she was 43), had checked the figures by hand against those of the newfangled electronic computer, he refused to go. 

她需要考虑飞船的倾斜度和行星的自转，这涉及到几十个方程来计算飞船在每个时刻所经过的是地球的哪一部分。凯瑟琳要确保艾伦·谢泼德的水星太空舱在1961年降落到能很快找到它的地方，还有确保约翰·格伦在1962年可以从他第一次绕地球运行的轨道上安全返回。他称凯瑟琳为“那个女孩”(当时她43岁)，事实上，直到凯瑟琳用手算把这些数字与最新的电子计算机的数字核对过之后，他才肯去。

That checking took her a day and a half. Later she calculated the timings for the first moon landing (with the astronauts' return), and worked on the space shuttle. She also devised a method by which astronauts, with one star observation checked against a star chart, could tell where they were. But in the galaxy of space-programme heroes, despite her 33 years in the flight research unit, for a long time she featured nowhere. 

那次检查花了她一天半的时间。后来她计算了第一次登月的时间(宇航员返回后)，还研究了航天飞机。她还设计了一种方法，宇航员可以根据星图对一颗恒星进行观测，从而确定自己的位置。尽管凯瑟琳在飞行研究部门工作了33年，但她在很长一段时间里都没有被列为太空计划的英雄。