In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, we would like to celebrate American aerospace engineer Virginia Tower Norwood who passed away earlier this year. She was best known for her contribution to the Landsat program. Via NPR
Virginia Norwood, a founding figure in satellite land imaging who developed technology to scan the surface of the moon for safe landing sites and map our planet from space, died Sunday at age 96.
Norwood is best known for developing the Multispectral Scanner System that flew on the first Landsat satellite, making her the “Mother of Landsat,” according to NASA.
Landsat 1, launched in July 1972, was the first satellite to study and monitor Earth’s landmasses and operated for nearly six years. The space agency said the “quality and impact of the resulting information exceeded all expectations.”
In the 1960s, a decade after becoming the first woman to work on Hughes Aircraft Co.’s technical staff, Norwood was part of an advanced design group at Hughes that worked on a NASA contract to create a spaceborne scanner. NASA was interested in getting multispectral images of the Earth from space, meaning images made from of a variety of different wavelengths, both visible and invisible.
Norwood went to the in-house inventor, S.D. “Webb” Howe, to create a scanner that could move constantly without breaking. Together, they designed a scanner in which only the mirror moved. As it banged back and forth 13 times per second, the mirror collected both visible and invisible light to feed to the scanner.
Learn more about her incredible career
Happy Ada Lovelace Day! Today, in honor of Ada Lovelace, the world celebrates all of the accomplishments of women in science, art, design, technology, engineering, and math. Each year, Adafruit highlights a number of women who are pioneering their fields and inspiring women of all ages to make their voices heard. Today we will be sharing the stories of women that we think are modern day “Adas” alongside historical women that have made impacts in science and math.