NASA's First Chief of Astronomy · 1925 – 2018
Nancy Grace
Roman
The astronomer who put telescopes in space — and became the Mother of Hubble
She was told, as a girl, that women could not be scientists. She went on to build America's entire programme of space astronomy from a blank sheet of paper, and to champion the great observatory that would become Hubble. Tomorrow, the flagship telescope that carries her name begins its own voyage to the edge of the visible universe.
.jpg)
01 A first, against the odds
Growing up in the 1930s, Roman was warned that science was no place for a woman. The head of her college physics department admitted he usually talked young women out of the subject — though he allowed she might be the exception. She ignored the discouragement, earned her doctorate in astronomy in 1949, and studied the chemistry of stars in ways that reshaped how we understand the Milky Way.
In 1959, one year after NASA was founded, she joined the young agency and became its first Chief of Astronomy — and the first woman ever to hold an executive post there. With, as she described it, a completely clean slate, she designed America's programme of space-based observatories from scratch. Even so, she later recalled that she often had to explain her credentials just to get past the front desk.
02 The Mother of Hubble
In the 1960s Roman gathered astronomers and engineers to imagine a telescope lifted above Earth's blurring atmosphere, where the stars sit still and sharp. She built the scientific case, won over the doubters, and — long before email or the internet — organised the community and persuaded Congress to fund it.
That campaign produced the Hubble Space Telescope, approved in 1977 and launched in 1990. Hubble transformed astronomy and gave the public a new sense of wonder about the cosmos. Its chief scientist gave Roman a lasting title: the mother of the Hubble.
I was told by many people that a woman could not be an astronomer.— Nancy Grace Roman, 2016
NASA's newest flagship observatory honours Roman by doing exactly what she spent her career arguing for: surveying the wide universe from space. Where Hubble studies the sky through a keyhole, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope takes in a panorama — a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble's, at the same crisp resolution — capturing millions of stars and galaxies in a single frame.
Dark energy
Map how the universe has expanded across billions of years to probe the mysterious force pushing it apart.
New worlds
Take a census of planets right across the galaxy, and use a starlight-blocking coronagraph to photograph distant worlds directly.
Wide-field surveys
Chart billions of galaxies in infrared light, building the first wide, deep maps of the cosmos at space-based sharpness.
.png)
She did not live to see it fly. Roman spent all ninety-three of her years exploring the universe, and left much of her estate to help girls and women into science. When the telescope that carries her name opens its eye tomorrow, it will look outward across billions of galaxies — exactly as she always urged us to.