Virginia Norwood, ‘Mother’ of Satellite Imaging Systems, Dies at 96
By Dylan Loeb McClain, April 12, 2023, NY Times
Virginia Norwood, an aerospace pioneer who invented the scanner that has been used to map and study the earth from space for more than 50 years, has died at her home in Topanga, Calif. She was 96.
Her death was announced by the U.S. Geological Survey, whose Landsat satellite program relies on her invention. Her daughter, Naomi Norwood, said her mother was found dead in her bed on the morning of March 27.
The Landsat satellites, speeding 438 miles above the surface, orbit the earth every 99 minutes and have captured a complete image of the planet every 16 days since 1972. These images have provided powerful visual evidence of climate change, deforestation
and other shifts affecting the planet’s well-being.
Ms. Norwood, a physicist, was the person primarily responsible for designing and championing the scanner that made the program possible. NASA has called her “the mother of Landsat.”
At the dawn of the era of space exploration in the '50s and ’60s, she was working at Hughes Aircraft Co. developing instruments. One of a small group of women in a male-dominated industry, she stood out more for her acumen.
“She said, ‘I was kind of known as the person who could solve impossible problems,’” Naomi Norwood told NASA for a video on its website. “So people would bring things to her, even pieces of other projects.”
In the late 60s, after NASA’s lunar missions sent back spectacular pictures of Earth, the director of the Geological Survey thought that photographs of the planet from space could help the agency manage land resources. Under this scheme, the agency
would partner with NASA, which would send satellites into space to take the pictures.
Ms. Norwood, who was part of an advanced design group in the space and communications division at Hughes, canvassed scientists who specialized in agriculture, meteorology, pollution and geology. She concluded that a scanner that recorded multiple spectra
of light and energy — like one that had been used for local agricultural observations — could be modified for the planetary project that the Geological Survey and NASA had in mind.
But first the scanner had to secure a spot in the launch of NASA’s first Landsat satellite. NASA and the Geological Survey planned to use a giant three-camera system designed by RCA, based on television tube technology, that had been used to map the
moon. The bulk of the mission’s 4,000-pound payload was reserved for the RCA equipment.
Ms. Norwood and Hughes were told that their multispectral scanner system, or M.S.S., could be included in the launch if it weighed no more than 100 pounds.
Ms. Norwood thus had to scale back her device to record just four bands of energy in the electromagnetic spectrum, instead of the seven that she had planned. The scanner also had to be high precision. In her first design, each pixel represented 80 meters.
The device had a 9-by-13-inch mirror that banged back and forth noisily inside it 13 times a second. Scientists at the Geological Survey and NASA were skeptical.
A senior engineer from Hughes took the device out on a truck and drove around California to test it in the hope of convincing the doubters that it would work. It did — spectacularly. Ms. Norwood hung one of the scanner’s images, of Yosemite National
Park’s Half Dome, on a wall in her house for the rest of her life.
The first Landsat blasted into space on July 23, 1972. Two days later, the scanner sent back the first images, of the Ouachita Mountains in Oklahoma; they were astounding. According to a 2021 article in MIT Technology Review, one geologist teared up.
Another, who had been skeptical about the scanner, said: “I was so wrong about this. I’m not going to eat crow. Not big enough. I’m going to eat raven.”
The RCA system was supposed to be the primary recording instrument aboard the satellite, and the M.S.S. a secondary experiment.
“But once we looked at the data, the roles switched,” Stan Freden, the Landsat 1 project scientist, said in a NASA report.
The M.S.S. proved not only better, but also more reliable. Two weeks after liftoff, power surges in the RCA camera-based system endangered the satellite, and the camera had to be shut down.
Over the next 50 years, new Landsat satellites replaced earlier ones. Ms. Norwood oversaw the development of Landsat 2, 3, 4 and 5. Currently, Landsat 8 and 9 are orbiting the earth, and NASA plans to launch Landsat 10 in 2030. Each generation satellite
has added more imaging capabilities, but always based on Ms. Norwood’s original concept.
The Landsat program has mapped changes in the planet brought on by climate change and by human actions. They include the near disappearance of the Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the evolving
shape of the Mississippi Delta, and the deforestation and increasing agricultural use of land in Turkey and Brazil.
Virginia Tower was born on Jan. 8, 1927, in Fort Totten NY, to John Vogler and Eleanore (Monroe) Tower. Her mother was a homemaker and also a linguist who spoke nine languages. Her father was a decorated Army colonel with a master’s degree in physics
who eventually taught at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh.
He encouraged Virginia to study math and physics and made her first slide rule with her when she was 9. As a military family, they moved frequently, living in Panama, Oklahoma and Bermuda, among other places. Virginia attended five different high schools
before graduating as the salutatorian of Germantown High School in Philadelphia.
Her school guidance counselor suggested that she become a librarian, advice that she ignored. Instead she applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was one of about a dozen women in her entering class.
A day after graduating, in 1947, she married Lawrence Norwood, a graduate student who had been her calculus instructor during her third semester. They had three children: Naomi, David and Peter. The marriage ended in divorce, and Ms. Norwood married
Maurice Schaeffer, who died in 2010. She is survived by Naomi and Peter; a sister, Barbara; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
After graduating, Ms. Norwood ran into the prejudices then permeating society, according to the MIT and NASA articles. When interviewing at Sikorsky Aircraft in Connecticut, she asked for a salary commensurate with the lowest rank in the civil service,
but was told the company would never pay a woman that much.
She withdrew her application at a food lab after she was asked to promise not to get pregnant.
She had three interviews at Remington, the gun manufacturer, in which she outlined how a staff mathematician could improve the company’s operations. The hiring manager called to say that her idea was brilliant, but that the company was going to hire a
man instead.
Desperate, she took a job selling women’s blouses at a department store in New Haven, Conn.
Finally she and her husband were hired by the U.S. Army Signal Corps Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, N.J. She worked in the weather radar division, where she designed a radar reflector for weather balloons that could detect previously untraceable winds at
100,000 feet.
She later moved to an antenna group, working on antennas that used microwaves; one of her designs remains classified. In 1953, she and her husband moved to California, where she went to work for Sylvania Electronic Defense Labs in Mountain View. She set
up the company’s first antenna lab.
A year later, the couple moved to Los Angeles, where she was hired by Hughes Aircraft’s research and development division, becoming the only woman among the division’s 2,700 employees. In 1957, promoted to lead the microwave group in the company’
s missile lab, she became the first woman at Hughes to join the technical staff.
One man, faced with the prospect of having Ms. Norwood as his boss, quit, saying he did not want to work for a woman, the MIT Technology Review article said. He returned several years later asking for a job, but she refused him.
In her new role, Ms. Norwood designed the transmitter and receiver for the world’s first communications satellite. A couple of years later, NASA sent a lander called Surveyor to the moon to scout possible landing locations for astronauts. Her team
designed the equipment the lander used to communicate with ground control. Ms. Norwood was comfortable with the “mother” of Landsat moniker. “Yes, I like it, and it’s apt,” she said. “I created it, I birthed it, and I fought for it.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/science/space/virginia-norwood-dead.html
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