Who Was Nancy Grace Roman?
NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy, the “mother of Hubble” — and the namesake of the space telescope that will map the universe on a scale she imagined.
Nancy Grace Roman decided as a child that she would be an astronomer, organizing an astronomy club with friends when she was about eleven. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Chicago and built a career studying the motions and chemistry of stars.
In 1959 she joined the newly formed NASA, becoming its first Chief of Astronomy and the first woman to hold an executive position at the agency. At a time when most astronomers worked at ground-based observatories, she argued that telescopes above Earth’s atmosphere would transform the field — and she made that case to scientists and to Congress for years.
She laid the groundwork for the Hubble Space Telescope, shaping the plans and building the scientific support that made it possible, which earned her the nickname “the mother of Hubble.” She also drove NASA’s wider Great Observatories program and helped establish the principle that space-telescope data should be widely shared with scientists.
In May 2020 NASA renamed the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) in her honor. It is fitting: Roman will make all of its data public as soon as it is processed, and it will map the sky on a scale she could only have hoped for.
- Born
- May 16, 1925 — Nashville, Tennessee
- Died
- December 25, 2018
- Known for
- NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy; “mother of the Hubble Space Telescope”
- Telescope named
- May 2020 (formerly WFIRST)
