WILBER B. HUSTON, a physicist with Nasa since its formation in 1958, worked on the Mercury manned space-flight programme, developing a method for astronauts to estimate their longitude based on the view from their capsule. In 1961 he moved to the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland to work on the Nimbus programme, a series of meteorological satellites used for weather forecasting and measuring climate change.
He was the director of seven launches of Nimbus satellites between 1964 and 1978. The synoptic views of the Earth they acquired clearly showed weather, geologic and vegetation patterns. Scientists interested in the Earth’s climate and resources quickly realised the importance of space-based remote sensing. The Nimbus spacecraft was a forerunner of the Landsat satellites, of which seven have been launched so far; they have taken millions of digital photographs of the Earth’s surface for more than three decades.
Wilber Brotherton Huston was born in 1912 in Detroit. His father was an Episcopal bishop whose appointments took the family to Wyoming, Maryland, Texas and Seattle. In 1929, in his last year at school, he applied for a scholarship sponsored by Thomas Edison that would pay his way through university.
There were thousands of applicants and when he was selected as a finalist Huston had to take a four-hour exam. Each finalist met a formidable set of judges, including Edison, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and George Eastman. Amid much media coverage, Huston was declared the winner.
He decided to attend MIT to study chemical engineering but switched to physics. After graduating in 1933 he worked for four years with Theodore Edison at Calibron Product. He then joined the Moral Rearmament movement and worked for the group. This gave him deferment, on religious grounds, from military service until 1943, when he was called up into the US Army. He taught bomber crews how to navigate from the stars.
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He subsequently joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (which became Nasa) and, between 1944 and 1958 worked as an aeronautical researcher at the Langley Research Centre, Virginia, before joining the Nimbus project in 1961. He retired from government service in 1974 and joined OAO Corporation before starting his own consultancy. He retired from this in 1988.
His wife and a son predeceased him. He is survived by three sons and two daughters.
Wilber Huston, physicist, was born on October 12, 1912. He died on May 25, 2006, aged 93.