Annie Easley, a hero of NASA | Space photo of the day for June 19, 2026

Annie Easley at NASA's Glenn Research Center. (Image credit: NASA) It's Juneteenth in the U.S. today (June 19), a federal holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in America. Though the Civil War ended in April of 1865, it wasn't until June 19 that same year when Union soldiers officially enforced the law that all enslaved people would be free. But the end of slavery was only the beginning of the challenges soon to follow; for one, segregation between Black and white people in the U.S., both systemic and informal, persisted for years. And we still live in a time when active racism, and the consequences of prior racism, trickle into many aspects of society. It indeed affected NASA ; Black women at the agency were once discriminated against despite making serious contributions to the space program. Our image of the day today celebrates the accomplishments of one such woman, Annie Easley. Who is Annie Easley? In 1955, Annie Easley started working for NASA's predecessor organization, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Her job was to serve as a "human computer," which was a position unique to the time. (NACA was dissolved in 1958, and its duties and personnel were taken on by the newly created NASA.) Human computers at NACA and NASA were women who worked as basically early versions of computer programmers. To be a human computer, you had to be extremely good at mathematics, performing reliable calculations on a consistent basis to aid space missions. …