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Ding Dang Trevor Flowers (trevorflowers@machines.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Dec-2023 14:31:14 JST Ding Dang Trevor Flowers

TIL about Virginia Norwood, by all accounts a badass engineer, mathematician, and physicist who made, among other scientific contributions, significant progress in the Landsat program.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Norwood
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsat_program
In conversation about a year ago from machines.social permalink
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1. A monochrome photo of a young person sitting at a radar terminal from the 1970s. Credit: By US-Army employee - https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/article/virginia-t-norwood-mother-landsat, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107743491
  https://machines.social/system/media_attachments/files/111/642/656/300/068/254/original/3b4c50bda30e91ed.png
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  Virginia Norwood
  
  Virginia Tower Norwood (January 8, 1927 – March 26, 2023) was an American aerospace engineer, inventor, and physicist. She was best known for her contribution to the Landsat program, having designed the Multispectral Scanner which was first used on Landsat 1. She has been called "The Mother of Landsat" for this work. Early life and education Virginia Tower was born on January 8, 1927, at Fort Totten in New York City, the eldest daughter of Eleanor Monroe and John Vogler Tower. He was an Army officer, had a master's degree in physics, and later taught at Carnegie Tech. Her mother was skilled in mathematics and languages and studied independently. Her father actively encouraged young Virginia's interest in physics and mathematics; he gave her a slide rule when she was nine years old, and helped to develop her mathematical skills. The family moved around with her father's military career, living in Panama, Oklahoma, and Bermuda. Once military families were sent back to the American mainland following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, she was a pupil at five high schools. In...
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  Landsat program
  
  The Landsat program is the longest-running enterprise for acquisition of satellite imagery of Earth. It is a joint NASA / USGS program. On 23 July 1972, the Earth Resources Technology Satellite was launched. This was eventually renamed to Landsat 1 in 1975. The most recent, Landsat 9, was launched on 27 September 2021. The instruments on the Landsat satellites have acquired millions of images. The images, archived in the United States and at Landsat receiving stations around the world, are a unique resource for global change research and applications in agriculture, cartography, geology, forestry, regional planning, surveillance and education, and can be viewed through the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) "EarthExplorer" website. Landsat 7 data has eight spectral bands with spatial resolutions ranging from 15 to 60 m (49 to 197 ft); the temporal resolution is 16 days. Landsat images are usually divided into scenes for easy downloading. Each Landsat scene is about 115 miles long and 115 miles wide (or 100 nautical miles long and 100 nautical miles wide, or 185 kilometers long and 185 kilometers wide). ...
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  Ding Dang Trevor Flowers (trevorflowers@machines.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Dec-2023 14:31:52 JST Ding Dang Trevor Flowers
  in reply to
  
  What I wouldn't give to be in the room with Norwood and Valerie Thomas, data encoding heavyweight and leader of the Landsat program at NASA, while they shaped the future of data collection and analysis using artificial satellites and room-sized computers.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Thomas
  In conversation about a year ago permalink
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  1. A person standing in front of a blackboard. Credit: By Adam Cuerden - https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/a-face-behind-landsat-images-meet-dr-valerie-l-thomas/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95433765
    https://machines.social/system/media_attachments/files/111/642/678/560/387/304/original/d37e6e96ab04c5a6.png
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    Valerie Thomas
    
    Valerie L. Thomas (born February 8, 1943) is an American data scientist and inventor. She invented the illusion transmitter, for which she received a patent in 1980. She was responsible for developing the digital media formats that image processing systems used in the early years of NASA's Landsat program. Early life and education Thomas was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She graduated from high school in 1961, during the era of integration. She attended Morgan State University, where she was one of two women majoring in physics. Thomas excelled in her mathematics and science courses at Morgan State University, graduating with a degree in physics with highest honors in 1964. Career Thomas began working for NASA as a data analyst in 1964. She developed real-time computer data systems to support satellite operations control centers (1964–1970). She oversaw the creation of the Landsat program (1970–1981), becoming an international expert in Landsat data products. Her participation in this program expanded upon the works of other NASA scientists in...

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