NASA’s Landsat Continues to Deliver Thanks to “Mother” Norwood

For half a century, NASA has launched Landsat satellites to look down and observe Earth from above. ese satellites continually deliver information on everything from geologic and geographic features to plant cover, watersheds, weather patterns and more. e information sent back is free and open to anyone. Some have called this the world’s most important satellite system ever.

Landsat 1 launched in 1972. Now, on the program’s 50th anniversary, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey have launched Landsat 9, which will image Earth from an altitude of 435 miles.

Those attending the launch included 94-year-old retired engineer, Virginia Norwood, who has been dubbed the “mother” of the Landsat satellite series. At a time when female engineers were rare, Norwood designed critical features of Landsat 1. Her contributions included groundbreaking remote sensing instruments critical to seeing and tracking otherwise hidden features on Earth. Per Norwood, her work “was the rst time that data from space had been digitized” and she is amazed and grati ed by the advances in detector technology that accompany Landsat 9.

Per the journal Nature, taken in whole Landsat represents “the longest-running Earth-observation mission” in history.

Thank you, Mother Norwood!