Virginia Norwood, satellite imaging systems ‘mother’, dies at 96

By Dylan Loeb Mcclain

NEW YORK: Virginia Norwood, an aerospace pioneer who invented the scanner that has been used to map and study the earth from space for over 50 years, has died at her home in Topanga, Calif. She was 96.

Her death was announced by the United States Geological Survey, whose Landsat satellite program relies on her invention. Her daughter, Naomi Norwood, said that 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.

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 1950s and ’60s, she was working at Hughes Aircraft Company, 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 1960s, 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. The agency would partner with NASA, which would send satellites into space to take the pictures.

Norwood, who was part of an advanced design group in the space and communications division at Hughes, canvassed scientists who specialised 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.

The Geological Survey and NASA 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 4,000-pound payload on NASA’s first Landsat satellite was reserved for the RCA equipment. Norwood and Hughes were told that their multispectral scanner system, or MSS, could be included if it weighed no more than 100 pounds.

Norwood had to scale back her scanner to record just four bands of energy in the electromagnetic spectrum instead of seven, as she had planned. It 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 in the scanner 13 times a second. The scientists at the Geological Survey and NASA were skeptical.

The MSS 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.