Nancy Grace Roman

Nancy Grace Roman (born May 16, 1925, Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.—died December 25, 2018, Germantown, Maryland) was an American astronomer who was instrumental in the planning and development of the Hubble Space Telescope. For her work she was dubbed the “Mother of Hubble.”

When Roman was young, her mother used to take her outside at night so she could learn about the constellations, and she was entranced with astronomy from then on. Roman attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and graduated in 1946 with a bachelor’s degree in astronomy. She earned a doctorate in astronomy in 1949 from the University of Chicago in Illinois, which operated Yerkes Observatory at Williams Bay in southeastern Wisconsin.

After completing her doctorate, Roman taught and did research at Yerkes. However, she felt that she, as a woman, would be unlikely to get a tenured post at a university, so in 1955 she took a job in the then-new field of radio astronomy at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C. There she mapped the Milky Way Galaxy and helped make the first radar measurements calculating the distance to the Moon.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was established in 1958, and Roman was asked if she knew anyone at NRL who could head NASA’s astronomy program. Although Roman had not been involved in NRL’s space activities like the Vanguard project, she later said that she could not turn down an opportunity to have such a huge influence on astronomy. The next year Roman became NASA’s first woman executive as chief of their astronomy program.

Space astronomy was a brand-new field, and Roman worked closely with other departments at NASA to develop pointing systems for space observatories to acquire and track objects. She also encouraged the development of space astronomy in areas of the light spectrum, such as X-rays and gamma rays and the ultraviolet, that could not be observed from the ground. Among the successful programs developed under her leadership were the Orbiting Astronomical Observatories and the Small Astronomy Satellites, the earliest of which, Uhuru, performed the first complete survey of the sky using X-rays. The International Ultraviolet Explorer was a particular success. It launched in 1978 and lasted almost 16 years beyond its projected three-year lifetime.

As early as 1946, American astronomer Lyman Spitzer had begun urging the United States government to launch an orbiting space telescope to record astronomical phenomena without interference from Earth’s atmosphere. Beginning in the 1960s, Roman worked with the astronomical community to make the space telescope a reality. In 1977 Congress approved the funding of the space telescope. (Writing to Congress in favor of the project, Roman submitted that “for the price of a night at the movies every taxpayer would receive fifteen years of exciting scientific results.”) The space telescope became the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), which was launched into orbit above the atmosphere in 1990. The HST provides images with much greater brightness, clarity, and detail than ground-based telescopes do.

Roman retired from NASA in 1979 but stayed involved with the HST project through consultant work. She subsequently worked part-time at the Astronomical Data Center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. There she improved the readability of astronomical catalogs. In 1995–96 she served as the director of the center. Roman left Goddard in 1997 to concentrate on volunteer activities. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in the mid-2020s, is named in her honor.