Sheila Scott is pictured here with her Piper Aztec “Mythre,” in which she made her world and a half flight in 1971. On this flight, she became the first person to fly over the North Pole in a single engine plane. She carried special NASA equipment for a communications experiment testing the Interrogation Recording and Location System (IRLS) of the Nimbus polar orbiting satellite. The IRLS equipment, a Balloon Interrogation package, transmitted data on Scott’s location during the 34,000 mile (~55,000 kilometer) flight to the Nimbus satellite, which relayed it to NASA’s ground station at Fairbanks, Alaska and then to a computer center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Sheila Scott’s record-making, historic flight confirmed the satellite’s ability to collect location data from remote computerized and human-operated stations with a unique “mobile platform” location test.
Image Credit: NASA