Virginia T. Norwood passed away earlier this year at the age of 96, and NASA’s farewell to this influential pioneer is a worth a read. Virginia was a brilliant physicist and engineer, and among her other accomplishments, we have her to thank for the ongoing success of the Landsat program, which continues to this day.
The goal of the program was to image land from space for the purpose of resource management. Landsat 1 launched with a Multispectral Scanner System (MSS) that Norwood designed to fulfill this task. Multispectral imaging was being done from aircraft at the time, but capturing this data from space — not to mention deciding which wavelengths to capture — and getting it back down to Earth required solving a whole lot of new and difficult problems.
The four-band MSS that launched on Landsat 1 (click to enlarge). Its results were transformative, and cemented multispectral imaging’s value to land and resource management.
Landsat 1’s payload was overwhelmingly taken up by a more traditional camera system, and so it launched with a stripped-down four-band multispectral imager (down from an original seven) that Norwood and her team shoehorned into the tiny payload allowed for their system. But nothing convinces like results, and the first ones blew people away. Priorities quickly changed; multispectral imaging was here to stay.
Norwood spent most of her career at Hughes, and a bio page at NASA points out that a ..
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