The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch this weekend aboard a SpaceX rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. When it becomes operational early next year, it will transform our view of the universe.
With a mirror the same size as the one in the Hubble Space Telescope but a field of view over 100 times larger, NASA’s newest tool is designed to survey vast swaths of sky quickly. It will hunt for dark energy’s fingerprints and detect perhaps 100,000 exoplanets.
In August 2018, just four months before she died on December 25, I had the great fortune to fly from Sydney to Washington, D.C., to interview the woman this telescope is named after. She was 93 years old, and over the hours we spent talking, she shared with me her remarkable life story.
A childhood passion for the stars
Nancy Grace Roman was born on May 16, 1925, in Nashville, Tennessee, and grew up captivated by the night sky. Her mother, Georgia Frances Smith Roman, encouraged this early curiosity, walking with her young daughter to point out constellations and the aurora borealis.
By age 11, Nancy Grace — never Nancy! — had already organized an astronomy club among her classmates in Reno, Nevada, where the family briefly lived. By high school she had decided, against the advice of nearly everyone around her, that she wanted to become a professional astronomer.
That ambition ran headlong into the sexism of 20th century academia. When Nancy Grace asked her high school guidance counselor for permission to take a second year of algebra instead of yet more Latin, the counselor reportedly asked her: “What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?” She took the math anyway. She went on to Swarthmore College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in astronomy in 1946, and then to the University of Chicago, where she completed a PhD in astronomy in 1949.
Her doctoral research focused on stellar dynamics and the motions of stars in the Milky Way, work that would foreshadow her lifelong interest in stellar populations and galactic structure.
After earning her doctorate, Nancy Grace remained at the University of Chicago and worked at the Yerkes Observatory, where she conducted research on stellar spectroscopy. This is the technique of spreading a star’s light into a rainbow and then analyzing faint features in the spectrum.
She made a name for herself with a landmark 1955 paper demonstrating a correlation between a star’s motion through the Milky Way and its chemical composition. Younger, metal-rich stars tend to move in more circular orbits, while older, metal-poor stars follow more eccentric ones.
This finding provided important evidence for how galaxies like the Milky Way evolve over time. Despite this success, she recognized that as a woman in academic astronomy, she faced a ceiling on promotion and tenure that her male colleagues did not. So she began looking for opportunities elsewhere.
Taking on an extraordinary responsibility
In 1955, Nancy Grace took a position at the Naval Research Laboratory, where she worked on radio astronomy, a field still in its infancy. It was there that she gained a reputation not just as a skilled researcher but as an effective administrator and communicator of science. These skills would soon define the second, more consequential half of her career.
In 1959, Nancy Grace was recruited by the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration to help build its space science program essentially from scratch. She became NASA’s first chief of astronomy, the first woman to hold an executive position at the agency.
It was an extraordinary responsibility. NASA had no established framework for space-based astronomy, and Nancy Grace was tasked with defining what such a program should even look like.
Nancy Grace’s most enduring legacy grew out of an idea she championed for decades (along with American astronomer Lyman Spitzer) before it became reality: a large space telescope that could observe the universe without the blurring and light pollution imposed by Earth’s atmosphere.
The project she nurtured through its most difficult years became the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990. Because of her foundational role in conceiving, justifying, and organizing the mission decades before it flew, Nancy Grace became widely known as the “Mother of Hubble.”
An extraordinary legacy
Beyond Hubble, Nancy Grace also helped establish several other NASA astronomy missions. These included the Orbiting Solar Observatory series and the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory, precursors that helped prove the value and feasibility of space-based observation.
She retired from NASA in 1979. She received numerous honors over her lifetime, including election to the National Women’s Hall of Fame and an asteroid, 2516 Roman, named in her honor.
In May 2020, NASA announced that its next-generation flagship observatory would be named the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, making her one of the very few scientists honored with a major space telescope named after them.
Nancy Grace’s career stands as a testament to persistence against institutional barriers and to the outsized impact that scientific vision can have. All astronomers continue to benefit from her extraordinary legacy.
Joss Bland-Hawthorn, Laureate Professor, Director of Sydney Institute for Astronomy, Faculty of Science, University of Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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