Received a Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Award for programming the NORC in the astronomical Project 29V, establishing Pluto's motion relative to Neptune.
On September 1, 1962, Gladys West received the Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Award for her critical contributions to Project 29V, an ambitious astronomical study conducted using the Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC), one of the most powerful computers of its time.
The project's goal was to precisely establish the motion of the planet Pluto relative to Neptune, requiring West and her colleagues to perform and program billions of complex calculations. This work demonstrated the growing power of computational mathematics to solve problems in celestial mechanics that had previously been intractable using manual methods.
This recognition early in her career validated West's exceptional programming and analytical skills, distinguishing her among her peers at a time when few women, and even fewer Black women, were given significant technical responsibilities in advanced scientific computing. The award set the stage for her later, even more consequential work in satellite geodesy, and remains a testament to her rigorous mathematical talent applied to some of the era's most challenging computational problems.