Google Honors First Native American Woman Engineer

01This is what's trending today.

02The search engine Google celebrated on Thursday what would have been the 110th birthday of the first Native American woman engineer.

03Google honored Mary Ross with a special Google Doodle on its homepage.

04Ross was born on August 9, 1908, in the state of Oklahoma.

05She was the great-granddaughter of John Ross, the longest-serving chief of the Cherokee Nation.

06Her work is considered critical to the early stages of the age of space travel.

07Ross showed special abilities in math and science from an early age.

08As a student, she developed an interest in aviation, or the practice of flying aircraft.

09She went on to earn a master's degree in mathematics from Colorado State Teachers College, now called the University of Northern Colorado.

10During World War II, Ross began working for the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation as a mathematician.

11There, she was urged to complete work in aeronautical engineering.

12She earned a special certification in the field from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1949.

13Ross was later chosen to join Lockheed's top-secret Skunk Works team that worked on aircraft designs.

14The name refers to a group that is permitted to work independently on advanced projects.

15She was the only female engineer among the team's 40 members.

16Early on, she researched defense systems.

17By the late 1950s, her work centered on satellites and a series of space rockets called Agenda.

18The rockets were extremely important in the 1960s during the Apollo-Moon program.

19Ross also helped develop early design ideas for space travel between planets, including fly-by space flights to study Venus and Mars.

20Ross retired from Lockheed in 1973.

21But she continued to give talks at high schools and colleges to encourage more women and Native Americans to study engineering.

22Mary Ross died in 2008, a few months before her 100th birthday.

23Many celebrated Ross's life on social media.

24The National Science Foundation wrote on Twitter Thursday, engineers like Mary Ross are an inspiration to women everywhere.

25Women and minorities continue to face challenges and breakthrough barriers in engineering.

26Scientists on Twitter wrote that Thursday's Doodle introduced them to Mary Ross for the first time.

27Twitter user Aaron Perez, for example, wrote, Mary Ross was an engineer who pioneered in the field of satellites.

28I never would have known if it wasn't for the doodle.

29Women engineers deserve more recognition.

30And that's what's trending today.

31I'm Lucia Maloneg.