Virginia Norwood, a pioneering aerospace engineer who had a pivotal role in finding safe Apollo landing sites, died at 96. A male colleague once quit rather than work under Ms. Norwood’s leadership. When he asked to return, she turned him down.
Over a four-decade career that began with slide rules and moved into the age of computer modeling, Ms. Norwood became known as a resourceful problem solver who often hit upon simple but effective solutions. She was also usually the only woman on the team — with at least one male colleague in the 1950s at Hughes Aircraft quitting rather than work under her leadership.Advertisement
Under Ms. Norwood’s direction, Howe designed a separate pivoting mirror that swayed back and forth at 13 times per second in the weightlessness of space. Each time it rocked, the mirror collected more data from the light spectrum, both visible and invisible, and fed it into the scanner.But it worked. The launch of the satellite in July 1972 was a crowning achievement for Ms. Norwood.
“I’d go to meetings and people were just jumping up and down because they had discovered another use for the data,” Ms. Norwood recalled., which touched down in June 1966, was NASA’s first craft to make it safely to the moon’s surface.
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