File:Virginia Norwood - 1948.jpg

Pioneering Earth Science

• https://www.science.org/content/article/meet-landsat-pioneer-who-fought-revolutionize-earth-observation

Virginia Tower Norwood: Planet Citizen, Earth Science Hero

• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/LANDSAT_and_Virginia_Tower_Norwood

Landsat was a model for all the following earth science research missions from space and is now moving into its fifth decade with Landsat 9.

• https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/landsat-9

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0034425720303382?dgcid=coauthor#f0005

• https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/landsat-1-3/landsat-1

• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space

Virginia Tower Norwood's Vision

Here we focus on the amazing story of Virginia Tower Norwood who invented technology that made LANDSAT's digital spectral imaging possible. In many ways, while inventing and convincing the reluctant aerospace men around her that digital imaging was the way to go, she was also continuing to be a first mover, graduating from MIT and creating a path of success for a next generation of women as scientists and engineers who would change the world.

The following excerpt from the MIT June magazine cover story shows us what went into the first LANDSAT mission -- an ongoing earth imaging and research data bank that is now going on fifty plus years. LANDSAT 9 is about to be launched and the open source archive of digital multispectral imagery is an unprecedented and unequaled font of knowledge tracking changes of Earth's systems and resources over time, a scientific treasure.

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