A couple of days ago, out of the blue, Eric Suomi got a call from NASA. The space agency wanted permission to name its newest Earth-observing satellite after his dad. “Of course I said yes,” said Suomi, an electrical engineer at Electronic Theatre Controls in Middleton. “My father would have been thrilled and honored.” The late Verner Suomi, a UW-Madison professor, was known as “the father of weather satellites.” So now the Suomi satellite orbits the Earth, predicting weather conditions, collecting climate change data and monitoring natural disasters.
Office of Strategic Communication