Physicist Works with Satellite Imaging

Despite excellent school grades ranking her among the top students, her guidance counselor suggested that she become a librarian. She politely disagreed, wanting to use her math skills beyond a librarian’s job focus.

Eventually, VN became a physicist – a scientist who specializes in studying the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists are generally interested in the root or ultimate causes of phenomena and usually frame their understanding in mathematical terms. Physicists can apply their knowledge toward solving practical problems or to developing new technologies. 

While the focus of a physicist’s research may seem vague or complex, VN’s career story demonstrates how using math skills can create practical ways to improve everyone’s daily life. 

FAMILY BACKGROUND

VN was born while her father, a decorated Army colonel, was serving in the military. He had a Master’s degree in physics and eventually as a civilian, was a professor of physics at a nationally respected university. VN’s mother was a homemaker and also a linguist who spoke nine languages. 

CHILDHOOD INTERESTS

VN’s father encouraged her to study math and physics as a child. He made her first slide rule with her when she was 9.  As a military family, they moved frequently, living in Panama, Oklahoma, and Bermuda, among many other places. 

EDUCATION

VN attended five different high schools before graduating as the salutatorian of a public high school in Philadelphia. 

Her high school guidance counselor suggested that VN become a librarian, but she ignored that advice, instead applying to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), where she was one of about a dozen women in her entering class. 

SHE PERSEVERED THROUGH EARLY JOB REJECTIONS AND A BORING JOB

Following her university graduation, VN ran into the prejudices then widely encountered by women. When interviewing at Sikorsky Aircraft, she asked for a salary commensurate with the lowest rank in the U.S. government’s civil service but was told that Sikorsky would never pay a woman that much. 

VN withdrew her application for employment as a scientist within a food lab after she was asked to promise not to get pregnant. 

She had three interviews at Remington, the gun manufacturer, in which she outlined how a staff mathematician could improve the company’s operations. The hiring manager called to say that while her idea was brilliant, the company was going to hire a man instead.

Desperate, VN took a job selling women’s blouses at a department store.

TALENT AND DETERMINATION LEADS TO A SUCCESSFUL CAREER

Finally, VN was hired by the U.S. Army Signal Corps Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, N.J., where she was assigned to work in the ‘Weather Radar Division.’ Here, VN designed a radar reflector for weather balloons that could detect previously untraceable winds at 100,000 feet. 

VN later moved to the Army Signal Corps group working on antennas that used microwaves; one of her designs remains classified since it was produced in the early 1950s. After VN and her husband moved to California, she went to work for Sylvania Electronic Defense Labs, where VN set up the company’s first antenna lab. 

A year later, the couple moved again, still within California, where she was hired by Hughes Aircraft’s research and development division, becoming the only woman among the division’s 2,700 employees. Soon, her talent and dedication led management to promote VN to lead the microwave group in the company’s missile lab, where VN became the first woman to join the technical staff. 

One man, faced with the prospect of having VN as his boss, quit, saying that he did not want to work for a woman. Several years later, the same man hoped to return to the company, applying for a job within the microwave group but VN refused to hire him. 

In her new role, VN designed the transmitter and receiver for the world’s first communications satellite. Several years later, NASA sent a landing spacecraft called “Surveyor” to the moon to scout possible landing locations for the first astronauts to later reach the moon’s surface. VN’s team designed the equipment the landed spacecraft used to communicate with ground control on Earth.

In the late 1960s, after NASA’s moon missions sent back spectacular pictures of Earth, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey thought that photographs of Earth from space could help the Geological agency manage Earth’s land resources. To bring such a plan into implementation, the Geological agency would partner with NASA, which would send satellites into space to take pictures of Earth. 

At the time, VN was part of an advanced design group in the space and communications division at Hughes. She canvassed scientists who specialized in agriculture, meteorology, pollution, and geology for their perspectives on how satellite pictures of Earth could be helpful to their different professional interests. VN conclude that a scanner which recorded multiple spectra of light and energy – like one that had been used for local agricultural observations on Earth – could be modified for the planetary project that the Geological Survey and NASA had in mind. 

But first the scanner had to secure a spot in the launch of NASA’s initial “Landsat” satellite. NASA and the survey planned to use a giant three-camera system designed by RCA, based on television tube technology that had been used to map the moon. Most of the mission’s 4,000-pound payload was reserved for the RCA equipment. 

CHALLENGE – LIMITED PHYSICAL DIMENSIONS FOR A NEW IDEA

VN and the Hughes company were told by NASA that their multispectral scanner system (M.S.S.) could be included in the launch only if it weighed no more than 100 pounds. VN thus had to scale back her creative device to record just four bands of energy in the electromagnetic spectrum, instead of the seven that she had planned. The scanner also had to produce high precision pictures. 

CHALLENGE – CONVINCING THE DOUBTERS

The VN-designed scanner had a 9 by 13-inch mirror that banged back and forth noisily inside it 13 times a second. Scientists at the Geological Survey and NASA were skeptical about the useful performance of VN’s scanner. 

A senior engineer from Hughes took the scanner device outside on a truck and drove around California to test it in the hope of convincing the doubters that it would work. It did – spectacularly!

The first Landsat satellite blasted into space on July 23, 1972. Two days later, the scanner sent back the first images – of mountains in Oklahoma; they were astoundingly precise in fulfilling the goal to map the Earth’s surface from space. 

According to a later account, one geologist teared up when he first saw the clarity of the scanner’s images of Earth. Another, who had been skeptical about the scanner, said, “I was so wrong about this. I’m not going to eat crow. Not big enough. I’m going to eat raven.”

The RCA system was supposed to be the primary recording instrument aboard the satellite and VN’s M.S.S. scanner, only a secondary experiment. “But once we looked at the data, the roles switched,” said the Landsat 1 project scientist. The M.S.S. proved not only better, but also more reliable. 

Over the next 50 years, new Landsat satellites replaced earlier ones. VN oversaw the development of Landsat 2, 3, 4 and 5. Landsat 8 and 9 are orbiting Earth (as of 2023) with Landsat 10 scheduled to launch in 2030. While each generation satellite has added more imaging capabilities, the core design has always been based on VN’s original concept. 

CAREER SATISFACTION

The Landsat program has mapped changes in the planet Earth brought on by climate change and by human actions. The changes include the near disappearance of the Aral Sea, the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the evolving shape of the Mississippi Delta and the deforestation and increasing agricultural use of land in Turkey and Brazil. 

VN is widely credited as the physicist who was primarily responsible for designing and championing the scanner which made the Landsat satellite mapping of Earth possible.

VN said, “I was kind of known as the person who could solve impossible problems.” So, people would bring things to VN, even pieces of other projects. Almost always, VN was able to use her intellect and determination to solve what had seemed to be impossible. For VN – as for almost every other woman working within a career populated mostly by men, success never came easy – first she had to prove her value as a mathematician regardless of her gender. 

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This career story is based on an obituary about Virginia Norwood, written by Dylan Loeb McClain, published by The New York Times on 4/14/23.