Chile Hosts the World's Largest Astronomical Observatory

Katherine Johnson, an African American mathematician at NASA, computed the orbital mechanics for multiple critical missions including the first American crewed spaceflight (Alan Shepard, 1961), John Glenn's orbital mission (1962), and the Apollo 11 Moon landing (1969). Glenn famously refused to fly unless Johnson personally verified the computer's trajectory calculations. She worked at NASA for 33 years and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. Her story was told in the film Hidden Figures (2016).

Hedy Lamarr, one of Hollywood's biggest stars in the 1930s–40s, was also a self-taught inventor. During World War II, she co-invented (with composer George Antheil) a radio guidance system for torpedoes using frequency-hopping spread spectrum — a technique that changes radio frequencies rapidly to avoid jamming. The US Navy initially ignored the patent. Decades later, this technology became the foundation for Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth. Lamarr received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1997.

In 1952, British chemist Rosalind Franklin produced Photo 51 — a landmark X-ray diffraction image of DNA that revealed its helical structure. Her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed it without her permission to James Watson, who used it as a key piece of evidence in the Watson-Crick DNA model. Watson and Crick — along with Wilkins — received the 1962 Nobel Prize for the discovery. Franklin had died of cancer in 1958 and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Her contribution went largely unacknowledged for decades.

Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 (shared with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel) for research on radioactivity, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 for discovering the elements polonium and radium. She remains the only person ever to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific disciplines. Born in Warsaw, Poland, she overcame profound barriers as a woman in science and became a professor at the Sorbonne — the first woman to do so.