Virginia Tower Norwood was an American aerospace engineer, inventor, and physicist best known for her contribution to the Landsat program, having designed the Multispectral Scanner which was first used on Landsat 1. Norwood attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she graduated in 1947 with a degree in Mathematical Physics. After graduation she began working at the United States Army Signal Corps in New Jersey, she took engineering classes through a Rutgers University extension progr... moreVirginia Tower Norwood was an American aerospace engineer, inventor, and physicist best known for her contribution to the Landsat program, having designed the Multispectral Scanner which was first used on Landsat 1. Norwood attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she graduated in 1947 with a degree in Mathematical Physics. After graduation she began working at the United States Army Signal Corps in New Jersey, she took engineering classes through a Rutgers University extension programme. A year after graduation from MIT she was hired by the U.S. Army Signal Corps Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey where she began working on weather radar. Norwood then moved to Hughes Aircraft Company where she worked for 36 years on a range of projects that included antenna design, communications links, optics, and the Landsat scanners. 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. In 1979, Norwood received the William T. Pecora Award and in 2021 she was also given an Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, the highest honour that society bestows on any individual. She was always referred to as the mother of Satellite Imaging Systems or Mother of Landsat.
