![]() ![]() By teaching a computer to account for gravity, tides, and other forces that act on Earth’s surface, West and her team created a program that could precisely calculate the orbits of satellites. Out of West’s work on Seasat came GEOSAT, a satellite programmed to create computer models of Earth’s surface. It was the first project to demonstrate that satellites could be used to observe useful oceanographic data. ocean surveillance satellite designed to provide data on a wide array of oceanographic conditions and features, including wave height, water temperature, currents, winds, icebergs, and coastal characteristics. In 1978 West was named project manager of Seasat, an experimental U.S. One of her first major projects was work on the Naval Ordinance Research Calculator (NORC), an award-winning program designed (via 100 hours of computer calculations, which often had to be double-checked for errors by hand) to determine the movements of Pluto in relation to Neptune. She eventually transitioned from solving those equations herself to programming computers to do it for her. At Dahlgren, Gladys West was admired for her ability to solve complex mathematical equations by hand. West, another Black mathematician on the base the couple married in 1957 and had three children. ![]() Naval Proving Ground, a weapons laboratory in Dahlgren, Virginia, as only their fourth Black employee. In 1956 Gladys was hired as a mathematician by the U.S.
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