Good morning! It’s an exciting day – a total solar eclipse in a race with the cloud cover that is so frequent here. So far it’s looking like cloud cover will win, but the sun is pretty powerful and we should still see the impacts of the eclipse, if not the actual sight.
With such an exciting celestial event happening, it’s also a good day to talk about Mary Golda Ross. She was born in Oklahoma in 1908; both of her parents were Cherokee citizens. Mary Ross earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics and taught for many years. During World War II she begin working for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation and, after the end of the war, went back to school to study engineering. She developed important theories about interplanetary space travel and earth-orbiting flights, and said that in her job she combined her mathematical knowledge with qualities from her Cherokee heritage. Despite the importance of what she did, a lot of her work is still classified, and so remains unknown.
Mary Ross gave considerable support to others even after her retirement through the Society for Women Engineers, the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. The Smithsonian museum opened only 20 years ago, in 2004, and Mary Ross (then 96 years old) attended the opening. She passed away in 2008, a few months before her 100th birthday.
Sources:
- “Mary Golda Ross: Aerospace Engineer, Educator, and Advocate” by Emily A. Margolis, Anya Montiel for the National Air and Space Museum on February 11, 2022.
- Google Doodle for “Mary G. Ross’s 110th birthday” from August 9, 2018.
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