Talk:Gladys West

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 4 January 2019 and 17 April 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Gwilliams06 (article contribs).

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 16 March 2020 and 1 May 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Jazwarfie (article contribs). Peer reviewers: TyrioneBanks.

Year of birth

according to this source [1] she was born in 1930. --Cholo Aleman (talk) 07:13, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

GPS

This article needs to clarify her contributions to GPS. They weren't (AFAICS) a direct contribution to the GPS programme, but rather in the fundamentals and background geodesy needed to make it work. Her specific contributions were more related to Seasat and Geosat, satellites which measured the precise shape of the Earth, rather than the satellites which would then provide navigational information within that. Her contribution wasn't to the navigational position fixing, but rather in relating that to where on the Earth the GPS receiver would then be. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:10, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

I tried to clarify this some. If you have some better understanding, please make additions! Skepticalgiraffe (talk) 04:40, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Duplicated References

Many of the references seem to be simply reprints of the one article, "Gladys West's work on GPS 'would impact the world'" in different magazines, or of "Meet Gladys West: One Of The 'Hidden Figures' Behind The Creation Of The GPS System", which quotes from that article. I have now consolidated these references. Skepticalgiraffe (talk) 03:59, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Pluto orbit

This sentence appears in the Air Force Space Command website: "Hired in 1956 as a mathematician at the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, she participated in a path-breaking, award-winning astronomical study that proved, during the early 1960s, the regularity of Pluto’s motion relative to Neptune."

Other than that mention, however, and several of the articles which seem to be quoting that mention, I can't find any link to her involvement in that work-- I search google scholar for any papers mentioning Pluto with her name as an author, and came out blank. Can anybody find any details on this? The only Naval Surface Weapons work on Pluto seems to be the work published by Cohen and Hubbard 1964. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1965AJ.....70...10C I assume she must have been the computer operator on this project? But she's not listed in the acknowledgements in the paper, and a search for "west" in papers by Cohen and Hubbard draws a blank.

It seems important enough that I added it to the article (citing the Space Command website as a reference), but it would be better if I had an actual reliable source, preferably with a link to her contributions in the original work. Skepticalgiraffe (talk) 04:34, 5 February 2019 (UTC)