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William Thomas Pecora

William T. Pecora (1913-1972) served as the 8th Director of the United States Geological Survey from 1965 to 1971.

Born in Belleville, N.J. in 1913 to Italian immigrants, Dr. Bill Pecora was the ninth of ten children. In high school, he earned a scholarship to Princeton University, where he graduated with honors in geology in 1933. At Princeton, he was an intercollegiate fencing champion in 1933 and later was a member of the 1936 U.S. Olympic fencing team in Berlin.

Pecora joined the USGS in 1939, completed his doctorate from Harvard in 1940. For several years, he investigated strategic mineral deposits in the United States and Latin America and then engaged in a long-range study of rare mineral deposits in Montana. Named USGS Chief Geologist in 1964, Pecora obtained approval to establish the National Earthquake Research Center in Menlo Park, CA, in response to the great Alaska earthquake of 1964. The Center provided a focal point for collaborative research on the causes and effects of earthquakes. In 1965, Pecora was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and appointed Director of the USGS.

During the 1950s, Pecora had been aware, along with agricultural scientists and other geologists, that aerial surveys of land surfaces could reveal features that were difficult, time consuming, and expensive to trace on the ground. 

However, only limited time and effort had been spent exploring ideas for an Earth-observing satellite. To ensure that sufficient attention would be brought to such a concept, Pecora convinced Interior Secretary Stewart Udall to issue a press release on September 21, 1966, announcing Project EROS: an Earth Resources Observation Satellite program.

After the announcement, Pecora collaborated closely with NASA, enabling the USGS to accelerate its remote sensing research in analyzing the potential values of surveying the Earth from space. In April 1971, Pecora left the USGS to become Under Secretary of the Interior and served in that capacity until his untimely death in 1972, just a few days before the launch of the first Landsat satellite.

The William T. Pecora Award was established in 1974 to honor Pecora. Sponsored jointly by the Department of the Interior and NASA, it is presented annually to individuals or groups that make outstanding contributions toward understanding the Earth by means of remote sensing. On July 23, 2012, the USGS and NASA celebrated 40 years of continuous Landsat imagery.

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