Mrs. Virginia Norwood

“The Mother of Landsat”

Virginia Tower Norwood is a retired American physicist. She is 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.

A year after graduating from MIT she was hired by the US Army Signal Corps Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. She began working on weather radar, later designing a radar reflector for weather balloons before progressing to work on microwave antenna design.

After five years at the Signal Corps she moved to Los Angeles and began working for Hughes Aircraft Company. She worked there for 36 years on a range of projects that included antenna design, communications links, optics and the Landsat scanners. During that period she designed the microwave transmitter that Surveyor 1 used to transmit data and images back to earth.

Norwood designed a six-band multispectral scanner for use on the first Landsat mission. Due to mission constraints the prototype was revised to use only four bands. The Multispectral Scanner, as it was known, was carried on Landsat 1. An improved seven band version, known as the Thematic Mapper was later included on Landsat 4.

Norwood retired in 1989. A biographical article published by NASA in 2020 referred to her as "The Mother of Landsat".