Meet Valerie Thomas, The Scientist Whose Computer Code Let NASA See the Earth From Space

When someone looks in the mirror, the image staring back at them is two-dimensional. It’s flat, just like the surface of the mirror. But what if that mirror was curved, like the bottom of a bowl? Could the light reflect back an image that looks three-dimensional?

These were the exact questions that American scientist Valerie Thomas was trying to answer when she designed her Illusion Transmitter, patented in 1980: a device that uses concave, or curved, mirrors to create the appearance of a 3-D image on the receiving end. This technology has modern applications: televisions could someday use this transmitter to project three-dimensional shows directly into our dining rooms. NASA used this technology to observe Halley’s Comet, and scientists are now exploring its potential to see inside the human body (“Valerie Thomas | Illusion Transmitter,” n.d.).

Throughout her scientific career, Thomas has looked toward the future, using her brilliant mind to make aspects of our world just a little bit clearer. After graduating from Morgan State University in 1964 as one of two female physics majors in her class, Thomas began working as a data analyst at NASA (Roccio, 2019). There, she became one of the essential members of an initiative that is still going strong today: NASA’s Landsat program.

In 1970, NASA started the Landsat program with the goal of viewing the earth from space using a satellite that could take pictures and produce multispectral images. Multispectral images contain data about Earth’s energy patterns, measured in multiple different wavelengths. Scientists use these images to observe changes in land use, water quality, and other environmental factors over time (Wulder et al., 2019). Early images from the Landsat were stored on Computer Compatible Tapes (CCTs), disks that stored the data in a format a computer could read—but not necessarily a format that scientists could understand. That’s where Valerie Thomas came in.