Bryn Athyn College Alumni Magazine Fall/Winter 2017-18 | Page 11

Mathematics teacher
Kenneth Rose and
moonwatch team leader
Wertha Cole review some
events of the watch and
discuss the orbits of the
man-made moons.
Bryn Athyn
“Moonwatchers”
Professor Wertha Cole’s
Historic Team
By Sasha Silverman
O
ver our heads, thousands of satellites fly through
space. They beam back music, news, pictures of weath-
er patterns, cell phone texts and voice messages, and
YouTube videos of cats. In the early 1950s, however, this would
have seemed preposterous. In fact, no one had seen a single pic-
ture of the earth from space. Getting just one satellite to stay
in orbit seemed unlikely. As Bryn Athyn mathematician Ken-
neth Rose (BA ’51) said, “If initial conditions of position and
velocity were slightly in error, I thought, the would-be satellite
would spiral into earth or out into space … I foresaw no success-
ful launchings.”
One woman, however, Wertha Pendleton Cole, had a more
optimistic view. As a professor of astronomy and former dean
B RY N AT H Y N A LU M N I M AG A Z I N E
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