Virginia Norwood, an aerospace pioneer who invented the scanner that has been used to map and research the earth from area for greater than 50 years, has died at her house in Topanga, Calif. She was 96.
Her loss of life was introduced by america Geological Survey, whose Landsat satellite tv for pc program depends on her invention. Her daughter, Naomi Norwood, mentioned that her mom was discovered useless in her mattress on the morning of March 27.
The Landsat satellites, rushing 438 miles above the floor, orbit the earth each 99 minutes and have captured an entire picture of the planet each 16 days since 1972. These photos have offered highly effective visible proof of local weather change, deforestation and different shifts affecting the planet’s well-being.
Ms. Norwood, a physicist, was the particular person primarily liable for designing and championing the scanner that made this system attainable. NASA has known as her “the mom of Landsat.”
On the daybreak of the period of area exploration within the Fifties and ’60s, she was working at Hughes Plane Firm, growing devices. One among a small group of girls in a male-dominated trade, she stood out extra for her acumen.
“She mentioned ‘I used to be sort of often called the one that may resolve unattainable issues,’” Naomi Norwood advised NASA for a video on its web site. “So individuals would convey issues to her, even items of different initiatives.”
Within the late Sixties, after NASA’s lunar missions despatched again spectacular footage of Earth, the director of the Geological Survey thought that images of the planet from area may assist the company handle land assets. The company would accomplice with NASA, which might ship satellites into area to take the photographs.
Ms. Norwood, who was a part of a complicated design group within the area and communications division at Hughes, canvassed scientists who specialised in agriculture, meteorology, air pollution and geology. She concluded {that a} scanner that recorded a number of spectra of sunshine and power, like one which had been used for native agricultural observations, may very well be modified for the planetary mission that the Geological Survey and NASA had in thoughts.
The Geological Survey and NASA deliberate to make use of a large three-camera system designed by RCA, based mostly on tv tube expertise, that had been used to map the moon. The majority of the 4,000-pound payload on NASA’s first Landsat satellite tv for pc was reserved for the RCA tools.
Ms. Norwood and Hughes had been advised that their multispectral scanner system, or M.S.S., may very well be included if it weighed not more than 100 kilos.
Ms. Norwood needed to cut back her scanner to document simply 4 bands of power within the electromagnetic spectrum as an alternative of seven, as she had deliberate. The scanner additionally needed to be excessive precision. In her first design, every pixel represented 80 meters.
The machine had a 9-by-13-inch mirror that banged forwards and backwards noisily within the scanner 13 instances a second. The scientists on the Geological Survey and NASA had been skeptical.
A senior engineer from Hughes took the machine out on a truck and drove round California to check it and persuade the doubters that it could work. It did — spectacularly. Ms. Norwood hung one of many photos, of Yosemite Nationwide Park’s Half Dome, on the wall of her home for the remainder of her life.
The primary Landsat blasted into area on July 23, 1972. Two days later, the scanner despatched again the primary photos, of the Ouachita Mountains in Oklahoma; they had been astounding. In response to a 2021 article in MIT Know-how Evaluation, one geologist teared up. One other, who had been skeptical concerning the scanner, mentioned, “I used to be so improper about this. I’m not going to eat crow. Not large enough. I’m going to eat raven.”
The RCA system was imagined to be the first recording instrument aboard the satellite tv for pc, and the M.S.S. a secondary experiment.
“However as soon as we appeared on the knowledge, the roles switched,” Stan Freden, the Landsat 1 mission scientist, mentioned in a NASA report.
The M.S.S. proved not solely higher, but additionally extra dependable. Two weeks after liftoff, energy surges within the RCA camera-based system endangered the satellite tv for pc and the digicam needed to be shut down.
Over the following 50 years, new Landsat satellites changed earlier ones. Ms. Norwood oversaw the event of Landsat 2, 3, 4 and 5. At the moment, Landsat 8 and 9 are orbiting the earth, and NASA plans to launch Landsat 10 in 2030. Every era satellite tv for pc has added extra imaging capabilities however all the time based mostly on Ms. Norwood’s unique idea.
The Landsat program has mapped adjustments within the planet introduced on by climate change and by human actions. They embrace the close to disappearance of the Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the shrinking of the Nice Salt Lake in Utah, the evolving form of the Mississippi Delta and the deforestation and growing agricultural use of land in Turkey and Brazil.
Virginia Tower was born on Jan. 8, 1927, in Fort Totten, N.Y., to John Vogler and Eleanore (Monroe) Tower. Ms. Tower was a homemaker and in addition a linguist who spoke 9 languages. Mr. Tower was a adorned Military colonel with a grasp’s diploma in physics who ultimately taught at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon College).
He inspired Virginia to review math and physics and made her first slide rule along with her when she was 9. As a navy household, they moved often, residing in Panama, Oklahoma, and Bermuda, amongst different locations. Virginia attended 5 excessive completely different excessive colleges earlier than graduating because the salutatorian of Germantown Excessive Faculty in Philadelphia.
Her faculty steerage counselor advised that she turn into a librarian, recommendation that she ignored, as an alternative making use of to the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how, the place she was considered one of a few dozen girls in her coming into class.
A day after graduating in 1947, she married Lawrence Norwood, a graduate scholar who had been her calculus teacher throughout her third semester. They’d three kids: Naomi, David and Peter. The wedding led to divorce, and Ms. Norwood married Maurice Schaeffer, who died in 2010. She is survived by Naomi and Peter; a sister, Barbara; 5 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
After graduating, Ms. Norwood bumped into the prejudices then permeating society, in accordance with the MIT and NASA articles. When interviewing at Sikorsky Plane, she requested for a wage commensurate with the bottom rank within the civil service, however was advised the corporate would by no means pay a girl that a lot.
She withdrew her software at a meals lab after she was requested to vow to not get pregnant.
She had three interviews at Remington, the gun producer, wherein she outlined how a employees mathematician may enhance the corporate’s operations. The hiring supervisor known as to say that her thought was good, however that the corporate was going to rent a person as an alternative.
Determined, she took a job promoting girls’s blouses at a division retailer in New Haven, Conn.
Lastly she and her husband had been employed by the U.S. Military Sign Corps Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, N.J. She labored within the climate radar division, the place she designed a radar reflector for climate balloons that might detect beforehand untraceable winds at 100,000 toes.
She later moved to an antenna group, engaged on antennas that used microwaves, and designed one that is still categorised. In 1953, she and her husband moved to California and she or he went to work at Sylvania Digital Protection Labs in Mountain View, the place she arrange the corporate’s first antenna lab.
A 12 months later, the couple moved to Los Angeles, the place she was employed by Hughes Plane’s analysis and improvement division, turning into the one lady among the many division’s 2,700 workers. In 1957, promoted to steer the microwave group within the firm’s missile lab, she turned the primary lady at Hughes to affix the technical employees.
One man, confronted with Ms. Norwood as his boss, stop, saying he didn’t wish to work for a lady, the MIT Know-how Evaluation article mentioned. He returned a number of years later asking for a job, however she refused.
In her new position, Ms. Norwood designed the transmitter and receiver for the world’s first communications satellite tv for pc. A few years later, NASA despatched a lander known as Surveyor to the moon to scout attainable touchdown places for astronauts. Ms. Norwood’s workforce designed the tools the lander used to speak with floor management.
Within the 2020 article on NASA’s web site calling her the “mom” of Landsat, Ms. Norwood mentioned she was snug with the moniker.
“Sure, I prefer it, and it’s apt,” she mentioned. “I created it, I birthed it, and I fought for it.”
Supply: NY Times
