Virginia Norwood sits on the Storm Detector Radar Set on the Army Signal Corps Laboratories in New Jersey in a photograph displayed on the Institute for Radio Engineers Convention, Spring 1950.

Virginia Norwood by way of NASA

conceal caption

toggle caption

Virginia Norwood by way of NASA

Virginia Norwood sits on the Storm Detector Radar Set on the Army Signal Corps Laboratories in New Jersey in a photograph displayed on the Institute for Radio Engineers Convention, Spring 1950.

Virginia Norwood by way of NASA

Virginia Norwood, a founding determine in satellite tv for pc land imaging who developed expertise to scan the floor of the moon for secure touchdown websites and map our planet from area, died Sunday at age 96.

Norwood is finest identified for creating the Multispectral Scanner System that flew on the primary Landsat satellite tv for pc, making her the “Mother of Landsat,” according to NASA.

Landsat 1, launched in July 1972, was the primary satellite tv for pc to check and monitor Earth’s landmasses and operated for practically six years. The area company stated the “quality and impact of the resulting information exceeded all expectations.”

In the Sixties, a decade after turning into the primary girl to work on Hughes Aircraft Co.’s technical workers, Norwood was a part of a sophisticated design group at Hughes that labored on a NASA contract to create a spaceborne scanner. NASA was inquisitive about getting multispectral photographs of the Earth from area, which means photographs produced from of quite a lot of completely different wavelengths, each seen and invisible.

Norwood went to the in-house inventor, S.D. “Webb” Howe, to create a scanner that would transfer continually with out breaking. Together, they designed a scanner during which solely the mirror moved. As it swayed 13 instances per second, the mirror collected each seen and invisible gentle to feed to the scanner.

This thought — the multispectral scanner that ended up revolutionizing the sphere — was met with skepticism from some NASA scientists who had settled on a conventional digital camera system. But it allowed satellite tv for pc imagery to transcend simply trying on the floor.

After Landsat 1 launched, NASA scientists had been amazed by the standard of the photographs. But Norwood wasn’t.

“I never had doubts about the MSS, because I designed it and knew it would work,” she told NASA in 2020. She was concerned within the first 5 variations of Landsat, with Landsat 5 launching in 1984.

Those early photographs enable at the moment’s scientists to evaluate adjustments within the Earth, like local weather change, shoreline erosion and deforestation.

Before the Landsat launch, Norwood developed a transmitter for the 1966 Surveyor mission to ship data again to Earth. That mission — the primary NASA craft to make it safely to the moon’s floor — collected details about what the lunar floor was like and what one of the best locations to land a crewed mission could be.

Norwood known as the day Surveyor landed “the most exciting time in my career.”

Norwood was born in 1927, lower than a decade after ladies received the proper to vote, and he or she was usually the one girl — and dealing mom — within the room all through her profession.

Upon seeing her excessive math aptitude scores, her highschool counselor had inspired her to pursue a profession as a librarian. Instead, Norwood graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a level in mathematical physics in 1947. She briefly frolicked promoting blouses at a division retailer earlier than she was capable of finding an employer prepared to rent a feminine mathematician.

In 1948, when she began working for the U.S. Army Signal Corps Laboratories in New Jersey. There, at age 22, she designed and patented a tool that detected high-altitude winds that had been beforehand untraceable.

A number of years later, she landed a job at Hughes Aircraft, turning into the one girl of their analysis and improvement labs. As she rose by means of the ranks, one man give up in protest. When he got here again to Hughes years later and requested to work in Norwood’s group, she said no.

When requested if she appreciated the nickname Mother of Landsat, she instructed NASA: “Yes. I like it, and it’s apt. I created it; I birthed it; and I fought for it.”