The Marjorie Rhodes Townsend Papers, 1960-1994, n.d., focus on Townsend's professional career in aerospace engineering at NASA and 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.

The colleciton is divided into the following series and subseries:

Series I: Personal Data, Presentations, and NASA Film, 1960-1985, n.d., contains three subseries of records documenting Townsend's accomplishments, her presentations given to professional, civic, and student groups, and script drafts for a film about space in which she was involved.

Subseries A: Personal Data, 1965-1985, n.d., contains her curriculum vitae and photos and clippings about her accomplishments.

Subseries B: Presentations for NASA and for the Public, 1960-1983, n.d., contains correspondence and notes or entire texts of presentations that she presented at engineering conferences, science lectures, student classes, and meetings of womens' professional groups.

Subseries C: Materials for the NASA Film Beyond Our Sun by John Larry Washburn, 1969-1972, includes four drafts of the script for the educational film made for NASA by Washburn. The collection is in chronological order.

Series II: NASA and Spacecraft Materials, 1961-1994, n.d., encompasses materials from her work at NASA and some consulting work thereafter. It is arranged in chronological order, with a few exceptions to keep related project materials together.

The following are common acronyms found in the collection:

• NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• GSFC - Goddard Space Flight Center
• IRLS - Interrogation, Recording and Location System, the first space data collection system
• SAS - 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
• APT - Automatic Picture Transmission