Sharing a blog post here that I did for Omnivoracious over at Amazon about writing “The Girls of Atomic City.”
You can hear my wife Denise Kiernan talking about her new book The Girls of Atomic City via this link from this interview which aired this morning on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday.
Denise was interviewed along with two of the women she profiles in the book.
The article accompanying the audio link also includes a free chapter of the book.
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Geez, I hope this post comes through okay. Been having problems. More stuff has been going on, too. Will post about it soon.
Thanks, baby! Homemade pizza for you later!
Love that one of my atomic “girls” made this promo for NPR’s Weekend Edition: Colleen Black, 88 years young. Tune in this Sunday, March 3, from 8 to 10 AM to hear more from Colleen, Celia Klemski, and me as we talk about the Manhattan Project and The Girls of Atomic City.
Melba Roy, NASA Mathmetician, at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland in 1964. Ms. Roy, a 1950 graduate of Howard University, led a group of NASA mathmeticians known as “computers” who tracked the Echo satellites. The first time I shared Ms. Roy on VBG, my friend Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a former postdoc in astrophysics at NASA, helpfully explained what Ms. Roy did in the comment section. I am sharing Chanda’s comment again here: “By the way, since I am a physicist, I might as well explain a little bit about what she did: when we launch satellites into orbit, there are a lot of things to keep track of. We have to ensure that gravitational pull from other bodies, such as other satellites, the moon, etc. don’t perturb and destabilize the orbit. These are extremely hard calculations to do even today, even with a machine-computer. So, what she did was extremely intense, difficult work. The goal of the work, in addition to ensuring satellites remained in a stable orbit, was to know where everything was at all times. So they had to be able to calculate with a high level of accuracy. Anyway, that’s the story behind orbital element timetables”. Photo: NASA/Corbis.