STS-51 Payload Handbook (NASA), 1993

Townsend's papers focus on her professional career in aerospace engineering at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and also include some of her later consulting work. The bulk includes correspondence with scientists, notes from staff meetings, documentation about the NASA projects she worked on, and publications that Townsend wrote or that relate to her work. There are also drafts of speeches (mostly to engineering, student, and women's professional groups) and newspaper and magazine articles about Townsend's professional accomplishments.

Much of the material is identified as work from NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and GSFC (Goddard Space Flight Center.) Acronyms for some of the projects she worked on include IRLS (Interrogation, Recording and Location System, the first space data collection system), SAS (the acronym for all three Small Astronomy Satellites, known as A,B, and C, and the first of which was called Uhuru), TIROS (Television InfraRed Observation Satellites), and APT (Automatic Picture Transmission).