Winifred Cameron

Winifred Sawtell Cameron (December 3, 1918 – March 29, 2016) was an American astronomer. She worked at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland for most of her career, and compiled the Lunar Transient Phenomena (LTP) database. She was involved in the Gemini and Apollo programs.

Winifred Cameron
Winifred S. Cameron, from a 1964 newspaper
Born	Winifred J. Sawtell December 3, 1918 Oak Park, Illinois
Died	March 29, 2016 Lehigh Acres, Florida
Nationality	American
Occupation	Astronomer
Known for	Worked on Gemini, Apollo programs
Notable work	Lunar Transient Phenomena database
Spouse	Robert Curry Cameron

Early life

Winifred J. Sawtell was born in Oak Park, Illinois, the daughter of Amos Alexander Sawtell and Mildred Winifred Shields Sawtell. Her father was an accountant.^[1] She was a Girl Scout,^[2] and graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1936.^[3] She earned a bachelor's degree and a teaching credential at Northern Illinois University in 1940, and completed a master's degree in astronomy at Indiana University Bloomington in 1952.^[4]

Career

After college, Sawtell worked at Weather Forecasts, Inc. in Chicago, from 1943 to 1946, and again from 1949 to 1950. She taught astronomy at Mount Holyoke College from 1950 to 1951. She was a researcher at the United States Naval Observatory from 1951 to 1958, analyzing sunspots.^[4]

In 1959, Winifred Cameron and her husband both joined NASA's new Goddard Space Flight Center, where she was a lunar expert^[5][6][7] and head of Data Acquisition and Analysis.^[8] She compiled the Lunar Transient Phenomena (LTP) database, still in use.^[9] She was astronomer-on-base at Cape Canaveral during two Mercury flights, and an advisor on the Apollo Moon landings.^[4] She was the only woman scientist in attendance at the international Lunar Geological Field Conference in Oregon in 1965.^[10] She gave frequent talks on her work to civic organizations, schools,^[11] and amateur astronomers.^[12][13]

In 1974, Cameron was a technologist at the National Space Science Data Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.^[14] She retired from NASA in 1984, but continued working on the LTP database.^[15] She was a member of the International Astronomical Union,^[16] the American Astronomical Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers.^[4]

Personal life

Winifred Sawtell married fellow astronomer Robert Curry Cameron in 1953.^[17][18] They had two daughters, Selene and Sheri. Robert died in 1972. Winifred died in 2016, aged 98, in Lehigh Acres, Florida.

There is an asteroid named 1575 Winifred, after Cameron;^[19] and she named a lunar crater Cameron in memory of her husband.^[4]