Congress is on Thanksgiving recess, but before they left for America's holiday this November, the 116th Congress passed a law to award Congressional Gold Medals to honor all of the women who contributed to the success of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration during the Space Race.

According to the bill, a gold medal will be presented in recognition of all women who served as computers, mathematicians, and engineers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration between the 1930s and the 1970s.

In recognition of their service to the United States during the Space Race, one gold medal will be presented to Katherine Johnson for her service to the United States as a mathematician; and another gold medal will be presented to Dr. Christine Darden for her service to the United States as an aeronautical engineer. In recognition of their service to the United States during the Space Race, one gold medal will commemorate the life of Dorothy Vaughan; and another gold medal will commemorate the life of Mary Jackson.

The bill states that after the award of the gold medal commemorating the life of Dorothy Vaughan, those medals will be given to the Smithsonian Institution, where the medals shall be available for display, as appropriate; and made available for research.

"It is the sense of Congress that the Smithsonian Institution should make the gold medals received available for display, particularly at the National Museum of African American History and Culture; or loan, as appropriate so that the medals may be displayed elsewhere. After the award of the gold medal in honor of Mary Jackson, the medal shall be given to her granddaughter, Wanda Jackson," the bill said.

The Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress called the Act the ``Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal Act''. The legislation was sponsored by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson.

According to Congress, in 1935, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics hired five women to serve as the first ``computer pool'' at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory where those women took on work making calculations that male engineers had made previously. During the 1940s, NACA began recruiting African-American women to work like computers and initially separated those women from their White counterparts in a group known as the ``West Area Computers'' where the women were restricted to segregated dining and bathroom facilities.

In 1953, Katherine Johnson began her career in aeronautics as a computer in the segregated West Area Computing unit.

As a member of the Flight Research Division, Katherine Johnson analyzed data from flight tests. After NACA was reformulated into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 mission in 1961, which was the first human spaceflight by an individual from the United States; coauthored a report that provided the equations for describing orbital spaceflight with a specified landing point, which made her the first woman to be recognized as an author of a report from the Flight Research Division; was asked to verify the calculations where electronic computers at NASA were used to calculate the orbit for John Glenn's Friendship 7 mission, and provided calculations for NASA throughout her career, including for the Apollo missions.

Katherine Johnson retired from NASA in 1986.

Christine Darden graduated from Hampton Institute with a B.S. in Mathematics and a teaching credential.She attended Virginia State University where she studied aerosol physics and earned an M.S. in Applied Mathematics.

Darden began her career in aeronautics in 1967 as a data analyst at NASA's Langley Research Center before being promoted to aerospace engineer in 1973. Her work in this position resulted in the production of low-boom sonic effects, which revolutionized aerodynamic design. Darden completed her education by earning a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from George Washington University in 1983. While working at NASA, Dr. Christine Darden was appointed to be the leader of the Sonic Boom Team, which worked on designs to minimize the effects of sonic booms by testing wing and nose designs for supersonic aircraft; wrote more than 50 articles on aeronautics design; and became the first African American to be promoted to a position in the Senior Executive Service at Langley.

Dorothy Vaughan began working for NACA in 1943. She started at NACA as a member of the West Area Computing unit; was promoted to be the head of the West Area Computing unit, becoming NACA's first African-American supervisor, a position that she held for 9 years; and became an expert programmer in FORTRAN as a member of NASA's Analysis and Computation Division. Dorothy Vaughan retired from NASA in 1971 and died on November 10, 2008.

Mary Jackson started her career at NACA in 1951, working as a computer as a member of the West Area Computing unit. After petitioning the City of Hampton to allow her to take graduate-level courses in math and physics at night at the all-White Hampton High School, Mary Jackson was able to complete the required training to become an engineer, making her NASA's first female African-American engineer. Mary Jackson, while at NACA and NASA, worked in the Theoretical Aerodynamics Branch of the Subsonic-Transonic Aerodynamics Division at Langley where she analyzed wind tunnel and aircraft flight data; and published a dozen technical papers that focused on the boundary layer of air around airplanes; and after 21 years working as an engineer at NASA, transitioned to a new job as Langley's Federal Women's Program Manager where she worked to improve the prospects of NASA's female mathematicians, engineers, and scientists.

Mary Jackson retired from NASA in 1985 and died in 2005.

These four women, along with the other African-American women in NASA's West Area Computing unit were integral to the success of the early space program, the Congressional citation said. The stories of these four women exemplify the experiences of hundreds of women who worked as computers, mathematicians, and engineers at NACA beginning in the 1930s and their handmade calculations played an integral role in aircraft testing during World War II; supersonic flight research; sending the Voyager probes to explore the solar system, and the United States landing the first man on the lunar surface.

You can read the full text of the Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal Act here.