Ms. Norwood’s daughter, Naomi Norwood, confirmed the dying however didn’t present a trigger.
Over a four-decade profession that started with slide guidelines and moved into the age of laptop modeling, Ms. Norwood grew to become often known as a resourceful downside solver who typically stumble on easy however efficient options. She was additionally often the one lady on the workforce — with not less than one male colleague within the Fifties at Hughes Aircraft quitting slightly than work beneath her management.
He later returned to the corporate and requested to work with Ms. Norwood. She turned him down.
With an Army Signal Corps workforce within the late Forties, her group was caught over how one can measure wind pace within the higher stratosphere above 100,000 ft, readings vital in creating long-range climate forecasting. Ms. Norwood got here up with a tool fabricated from reflective disks — suspended on fishing-line swivels — that may spin on a climate balloon and may very well be tracked by radar. The concept was patented beneath her identify.
In the Sixties, when Ms. Norwood was at Hughes, she confronted a puzzle over a deliberate satellite tv for pc that grew to become often known as Landsat 1: how one can maintain the Earth-scanning gear from breaking beneath the stress of fixed motion? She sought out Hughes’s “resident inventor,” S.D. “Webb” Howe, who determined the complete scanner wouldn’t transfer, simply mirrors would.
Under Ms. Norwood’s course, Howe designed a separate pivoting mirror that swayed backwards and forwards at 13 instances per second within the weightlessness of area. Each time it rocked, the mirror collected extra knowledge from the sunshine spectrum, each seen and invisible, and fed it into the scanner.
Not everybody was on board. “They knew that there was a banging mirror,” Ms. Norwood advised the MIT Technology Review. “They just felt that was too crude.”
But it labored. The launch of the satellite tv for pc in July 1972 was a crowning achievement for Ms. Norwood. She grew to become often known as the “mother of Landsat” and credited with serving to carry a totally new perspective and understanding of the planet and its interlocking options and ecosystems.
Ms. Norwood’s Multispectral Scanner — capturing seen colours and different wavelengths not picked up on regular gear corresponding to infrared — took the present satellite tv for pc imagery past simply trying on the floor. Her scanner introduced insights into points corresponding to water high quality, crop well being, soil moisture and snowpack density.
For the primary time, digital knowledge was out there that allowed preventive motion: recognizing tree blights in early phases or offering complete info on watersheds for crop planning and flood safety. NASA later stated it was the primary digital knowledge transmission from area.
For at the moment’s researchers, the photographs from the early generations of Landsat satellites provide essential baseline information to evaluate local weather change, shoreline 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, was NASA’s first craft to make it safely to the moon’s floor. Surveyor 1 and the following Surveyors through the Sixties had been scouts looking for primary questions: What was the moon’s crust like, and the place had been the perfect potential spots to land a crewed mission?
“They didn’t want the man to fall down a crack in the moon,” Ms. Norwood recalled.
Her job, together with the microwave group she led at Hughes, was to develop transmitters and receivers on Surveyor to select up NASA’s instructions. Among the various issues, area was tight. Surveyor was compact, and the communications system needed to be, too.
Ms. Norwood discovered the reply within the design of flowers: an antenna that opened up from a good bud right into a parabola-shaped dish. That grew to become her second patent.
In 2020, a NASA interviewer requested Ms. Norwood if she was snug 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 was born at Fort Totten, within the New York City borough of Queens, on Jan. 8, 1927. Her father was an Army officer, and her mom tended to the house but additionally studied arithmetic and languages on her personal.
The household moved recurrently due to army postings in Oklahoma (the place she was in a Girl Scout troop led by Gen. George S. Patton’s daughter, Ruth), Panama and Bermuda. The household then went to Pittsburgh when her father took a place educating physics at Carnegie Institute of Technology, now a part of Carnegie Mellon University. (Her father made her first slide rule when she in grade college.)
She enrolled in 1943 at MIT, one among a couple of dozen ladies in her class. She later known as it navigating a “sea of men.” She graduated in 1947 with a level in mathematical physics.
Soon after getting her diploma, she married her former calculus teacher at MIT, Lawrence Norwood.
Ms. Norwood stated she was turned down by many employers for tech-related positions, presumably due to her gender. At Sikorsky Aircraft, she walked away after being requested to vow to not get pregnant if she took a job in meals companies. 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 had been provided a job on the Army’s Signal Corps laboratories in New Jersey. The couple moved to Southern California in 1953, the place the climate was higher to take pleasure in Ms. Norwood’s ardour for sports activities vehicles. (Her final automotive, a blue six-speed Mazda Miata, was pushed till Ms. Norwood couldn’t renew her license through the pandemic.)
In California, Ms. Norwood first labored for Sylvania Electronic Defense Labs and arrange its antenna take a look at vary, after which joined Hughes. After she was put in command of the microwave group within the firm’s missile lab in 1957 — the primary lady within the function — a male co-worker stop. He was rehired at Hughes, however Ms. Norwood rejected his request to return to her workforce.
Ms. Norwood additionally led the design of the transmitter and microwave receiver for the world’s first communications satellite tv for pc, Syncom 2, used within the first two-way satellite tv for pc name between authorities leaders when President John F. Kennedy in Washington chatted with Nigeria’s prime minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, in 1963.
Ms. Norwood retired in 1989. Among her awards was the O.M. Miller Cartographic Medal from the American Geographical Society in 2022 for her Landsat imaging system 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 embody one other baby from her first marriage, Peter Norwood; three stepchildren, David Schaeffer, Andrew Schaeffer and Claudia Schaeffer; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Landsat goes on: now as much as Landsat 9. There’s additionally a “Ladies of Landsat” group for ladies who’ve labored in this system over the many years since Ms. Norwood.
“I’ve spent my life where I was the only woman in a program,” Ms. Norwood advised Science in 2021. “Now, there’s a whole group of them. That’s kind of nice.”