Ms. Norwood’s daughter, Naomi Norwood, showed the demise however didn’t supply a purpose.
Over a four-decade profession that started with slide regulations and moved into the age of pc modeling, Ms. Norwood changed into identified as a resourceful downside solver who ceaselessly stumble on easy however efficient answers. She used to be additionally most often the most effective lady on the group — with at least one male colleague in the Fifties at Hughes Aircraft quitting fairly than paintings beneath her management.
He later returned to the corporate and requested to paintings with Ms. Norwood. She grew to become him down.
With an Army Signal Corps group in the past due Forties, her team used to be caught over the right way to measure wind pace in the higher stratosphere above 100,000 ft, readings vital in growing long-range climate forecasting. Ms. Norwood got here up with a tool made of reflective disks — suspended on fishing-line swivels — that may spin on a climate balloon and might be tracked through radar. The thought used to be patented beneath her identify.
In the Sixties, when Ms. Norwood used to be at Hughes, she confronted a puzzle over a deliberate satellite tv for pc that changed into identified as Landsat 1: the right way to stay the Earth-scanning apparatus from breaking beneath the pressure of consistent motion? She sought out Hughes’s “resident inventor,” S.D. “Webb” Howe, who determined the whole scanner wouldn’t transfer, simply mirrors would.
Under Ms. Norwood’s course, Howe designed a separate pivoting reflect that swayed from side to side at 13 occasions in step with 2d in the weightlessness of house. Each time it rocked, the reflect gathered extra knowledge from the gentle spectrum, each visual and invisible, and fed it into the scanner.
Not everybody used to be on board. “They knew that there was a banging mirror,” Ms. Norwood told the MIT Technology Review. “They just felt that was too crude.”
But it labored. The release of the satellite tv for pc in July 1972 used to be a crowning success for Ms. Norwood. She changed into identified as the “mother of Landsat” and credited with serving to convey an absolutely new viewpoint and working out of the planet and its interlocking options and ecosystems.
Ms. Norwood’s Multispectral Scanner — shooting visual colours and different wavelengths now not picked up on commonplace apparatus such as infrared — took the present satellite tv for pc imagery past simply having a look at the floor. Her scanner introduced insights into facets such as water high quality, crop well being, soil moisture and snowpack density.
For the first time, virtual knowledge used to be to be had that allowed preventive motion: recognizing tree blights in early phases or offering complete information on watersheds for crop making plans and flood coverage. NASA later stated it used to be the first virtual knowledge transmission from house.
For nowadays’s researchers, the pictures from the early generations of Landsat satellites be offering essential baseline data to evaluate local weather trade, coastline erosion, rainforest loss and different shifts.
“I’d go to meetings and people were just jumping up and down because they had discovered another use for the data,” Ms. Norwood recalled.
She already had triumphs on the moon beneath her belt. The lunar probe Surveyor 1, which touched down in June 1966, used to be NASA’s first craft to make it safely to the moon’s floor. Surveyor 1 and the next Surveyors all over the Sixties have been scouts in quest of fundamental questions: What used to be the moon’s crust like, and the place have been the highest doable spots to land a crewed venture?
“They didn’t want the man to fall down a crack in the moon,” Ms. Norwood recalled.
Her activity, along side the microwave team she led at Hughes, used to be to broaden transmitters and receivers on Surveyor to pick out up NASA’s instructions. Among the many headaches, house used to be tight. Surveyor used to be compact, and the communications device needed to be, too.
Ms. Norwood discovered the solution in the design of plants: an antenna that spread out from a good bud right into a parabola-shaped dish. That changed into her 2d patent.
In 2020, a NASA interviewer requested Ms. Norwood if she used to be pleased with the sobriquet “mother of Landsat.”
Ms. Norwood didn’t hesitate. “Yes. I like it, and it’s apt,” she stated. “I created it. I birthed it, and I fought for it.”
Virginia Monroe Tower used to be born at Fort Totten, in the New York City borough of Queens, on Jan. 8, 1927. Her father used to be an Army officer, and her mom tended to the house but additionally studied arithmetic and languages on her personal.
The circle of relatives moved ceaselessly as a result of of army postings in Oklahoma (the place she used to be in a Girl Scout troop led through Gen. George S. Patton’s daughter, Ruth), Panama and (*96*). The circle of relatives then went to Pittsburgh when her father took a place educating physics at Carnegie Institute of Technology, now section of Carnegie Mellon University. (Her father made her first slide rule when she in grade college.)
She enrolled in 1943 at MIT, one of a couple of dozen girls in her elegance. She later referred to as it navigating a “sea of men.” She graduated in 1947 with some extent in mathematical physics.
Soon once you have her degree, she married her former calculus teacher at MIT, Lawrence Norwood.
Ms. Norwood stated she used to be grew to become down through many employers for tech-related positions, probably as a result of of her gender. At Sikorsky Aircraft, she walked away after being requested to vow to not get pregnant if she took a task in meals products and services. At one level, she labored at a division retailer in New Haven, Conn., hiding her having been an MIT graduate.
In 1948, she and her husband have been presented a task at the Army’s Signal Corps laboratories in New Jersey. The couple moved to Southern California in 1953, the place the climate used to be higher to take pleasure in Ms. Norwood’s pastime for sports activities automobiles. (Her ultimate automotive, a blue six-speed Mazda Miata, used to be pushed till Ms. Norwood couldn’t renew her license all over the pandemic.)
In California, Ms. Norwood first labored for Sylvania Electronic Defense Labs and arrange its antenna check differ, after which joined Hughes. After she used to be installed fee of the microwave team in the corporate’s missile lab in 1957 — the first lady in the position — a male co-worker give up. He used to be rehired at Hughes, however Ms. Norwood rejected his request to go back to her group.
Ms. Norwood additionally led the design of the transmitter and microwave receiver for the global’s first communications satellite tv for pc, Syncom 2, utilized in the first two-way satellite tv for pc name between govt leaders when President John F. Kennedy in Washington chatted with Nigeria’s high minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, in 1963.
Ms. Norwood retired in 1989. Among her awards used to be the O.M. Miller Cartographic Medal from the American Geographical Society in 2022 for her Landsat imaging device that “transformed expectations of how we can know the Earth.”
Her first marriage led to divorce. She later married Maurice Schaeffer, who died in 2010. A son from her first marriage, David Norwood, died in 2012.
In addition to her daughter, survivors come with some other kid from her first marriage, Peter Norwood; 3 stepchildren, David Schaeffer, Andrew Schaeffer and Claudia Schaeffer; seven grandchildren; and 3 great-grandchildren.
Landsat is going on: now as much as Landsat 9. There’s additionally a “Ladies of Landsat” team for girls who have labored in the program over the many years since Ms. Norwood.
“I’ve spent my life where I was the only woman in a program,” Ms. Norwood told Science in 2021. “Now, there’s a whole group of them. That’s kind of nice.”