 |
| Nancy Grace Roman, linocut, 11" x 14" on Japanese paper by Ele Willoughby, 2026 |
Born in Nashville, Nancy came by her love of school and science honestly from her music teacher mother Georgia Frances Smith Roman and physicist and mathematician father Irwin Roman. Her father got an oil industry geophysics job and moved the family to Oklahoma when Nancy was only 3 months old. His job also brought them to Texas, New Jersey, Michigan (where the dark night skies allowed her mother to show her the constellations and northern lights), and, when he joined the Civil Service as a geophysicist in 1936, to Nevada. The frequent moves meant that Nancy had to repeatedly work on her own to catch up with her new class and curriculum and that she did not have a lot of chance to make close friends. The next year, when Nancy was about 12, her father was hired as Senior Geophysicist at the Baltimore office of the U.S. Geological Survey, and Nancy started an astronomy club with her classmates so they could learn the constellations. By the 7th grade, she knew she would be an astronomer. She completed an accelerated program at Western High School in Baltimore, graduating in only 3 years. She never had a telescope but read every book on astronomy in the Baltimore library. As a girl, her science interests were not encouraged; when she requested a second year of algebra instead of taking Latin, her guidance counsellor "looked down her nose at me and sneered, 'What kind of lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?' That was the sort of reception I got most of the way”, Nancy recalled. But because the US entered the war, Nancy got the chance to substitute a summer of chemistry for her senior year of high school and started college early.
Nancy went to Swarthmore, where she said of the dean of women "if you insisted on majoring in science or engineering, she wouldn't have anything more to do with you" but she did refer her to the astronomy department. The chair Peter van de Kamp tried to discourage her from this path but did teach her astronomy. She was able to work with two previously defunct student telescopes which gave her a feel for instruments and instrumentation and let her have "the fun of playing around with observing techniques." In her second year she began working at Swarthmore's Sproul Observatory processing astronomical photographic plates. Van de Kamp gave her a solo lecture on astrometry, which studies the precise positions and movements of celestial bodies and was his field of expertise. He suggested she learn about professional astronomy from the astronomical library. She recalls the only encouragement she got was from the Physics Department head who said, "I usually try to discourage girls from going into physics, but I think maybe you might make it." When she graduated in February 1946, Van de Kamp recommended she pursue graduate studies at the University of Chicago, which was rebuilding its astronomy department after the war.
By March she was enrolled and finding classes easier than those at Swarthmore, so she asked three professors, Otto Struve, George van Biesbroeck, and William Wilson Morgan, for extra projects to help her decide what she would like to focus on for her thesis. Biesbroeck asked her to solve the orbit of a double-star. Struve gave her a couple of interesting stellar spectra to analyse. Morgan's observational project using a 12 inch (30 cm) telescope expanded into her thesis. The first time she meet her supervisor Morgan he asked her to go to his house and change the bed because his wife was sick, a task he would never have asked a male student. Surprised and flummoxed, she acquiesced. Professors complained about teaching women whom they assumed would quit to get married. Morgan was not encouraging and at one point did not even speak to her to say hello for six months. Nevertheless, she got the guidance Morgan neglected to offer from visiting scientists Bengt Stromgren and Adriaan Blaauw and she succeeded in completing her doctorate on the Ursa Major Moving Group in 1949. The stars in Ursa Major featured in my portrait, are bright remnants of a now scattered cluster; she found 200 stars that had left the Dipper at the same time, and knowing their distances from geometry she was able to determine their actual intrinsic brightnesses. This was an improvement on getting intrinsic brightness from their spectra. The night before her defence, Morgan who typically worked late, insisted on meeting her at midnight and "decided to use it as an occasion for petting"; she moved his hand several times and tried to continue their conversation. Mercifully he did not try this again. Since the disinterested Morgan was unable to tell other faculty how her research was going, they had assumed she wasn't working and were surprised when she had no trouble defending her thesis. While in graduate school she also began a life-long association with the American Association of University Women (AAUW).
She spent two months at Warner and Swasey Observatory, in Cleveland, before agreeing to be Morgan's research associate at Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. During her six years there she was able to visit the University of Chicago's McDonald Observatory in Texas for four months every year. When the position ended she was employed as an instructor and then assistant professor. As was typical at the time her salary was less than two thirds of a similarly qualified male. Department Chair and Nobel laureate Subramanyan Chandrasekhar (whom had certainly been subject of racial discrimination, but unable to recognize sexual discrimination) told her, "We don't discriminate against women - we can just get them for less." She made a study of naked-eye visible stars and noticed that the proportion of elements heavier than helium (that astronomers call metals) varied; those with stronger metal lines moved in more circular orbits closer to the galactic centre and plane of the Milky Way, and those with weaker lines moved more elliptically and further away. Younger stars are made from the expelled nuclear remnants of exploded stars that had built up heavier metals over their lifetime and then gone nova. So younger stars are more metal-rich. Older, redder, less metal-rich stars had slower, more elliptical and inclined orbits than the bluer metal-rich younger stars moving in circular orbits and sticking close to the galactic plane as they form. This gave some of the first clues about the formation of the Galaxy. Her 1950 paper was selected as one of most important 100 papers of the century in Astrophysical Journal. She then looked at star colours and spectra and found that since more of the metal lines are in the violet and UV, stars with weaker metals were slightly bluer in the UV than their colours in the red would suggest. This "UV excess" proved an easier way to distinguish the metallicity of stars and is still a useful tool. I allude to this work and later research in the stellar spectrum (at the blue end) illustrated on her shirt in my portrait. These she considered her two most important discoveries. Morgan tried to take credit for her work, though he had not been involved. Her research was very impactful and amongst the most highly-cited papers of the time, including, in 1950, three top-100 papers in a single year, with over 3,000 citations. But she was dubious of her ability to get a tenure as a woman, at an institution which could support her research. She turned down positions at Wayne State University and the University of Southern California, because they could not offer access to astronomical instrumentation she needed. She was able to use a new astrometry device for measuring photographic plates at the Argonne National Laboratory, but Yerkes would not acquire one. Likewise when she argued in 1954, they should acquire a digital computer for data analysis, still novel at the time, the department chair Chandrasekhar declared computers not useful for this purpose! While studying stars at different Galactic latitudes during her visit to the David Dunlap Observatory in Toronto she noted one which was not sun-like as expected. She thought she must have made an error and so she checked it again when she returned to Yerkes. She had discovered that the emission spectrum of the star AG Draconis had completely changed from earlier observations. She called it a stroke of luck; this star is only in this altered state 2 to 3% of the time. This observation raised her profile. She published her new "spectral types, photoelectric magnitudes and colors, and spectroscopic parallaxes for about 600 high-velocity stars," in 1955 as part of the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. She also published on the detection of exoplanets.
She met a Scottish postdoc and fell in love. Since it would have been a challenge to find two astronomy positions in the same place, she considered giving up astronomy to marry, but their relationship did not work out. His fellowship required him to go to a commonwealth country and he found a position in Australia. They wrote regularly for a few years but it was not to be. A couple of years later she was surprised by a proposal of marriage from a man with whom she had not spent a great deal of time alone; she considered it seriously but turned him down. They remained friends until he died.
Knowing the university had never appointed a woman to the academic staff she decided to move on. Morgan wanted her to stay and deliberately did not inform her of job openings but another faculty member, Gerard Kuiper had recommended to her a position and the Naval Research Laboratories in the new field of radio astronomy. She enjoyed teaching but did not want to only be a teacher, so decided government science might be her best bet. She moved to Washington, D.C. and remained there for the rest of her life. She found women were better tolerated, and better paid in government science. She spent three years at NRL, where she worked on radio astronomy, using radio astronomy for geodesy, the propagation of sound in water, and became head of the microwave spectroscopy section of the radio astronomy program. She mapped the Milky Way at 440 MHz. She also consulted on the Project Vanguard satellite program, which introduced her to space astronomy. Because of her observation of the unexpected spectra of AG Draconis, she was invited to speak in Armenia, then part of the Soviet Union, in 1956 for the dedication of the Byurakan Observatory, making her the first civilian to visit since the Cold War. NRL leaders were very interested and this and it lead to higher profile and a series of invitations to give astronomy lectures back home. Most of the science section at NASA came from NRL, so they knew Roman. She attended a talk at the newly-formed NASA by Harold Urey, where Jack Clark asked her if knew anyone interested in starting a space astronomy program there; she took that as an invitation to apply.
She was offered the job, and accepted in 1959 even though she suspected a management position would mean giving up research because "the chance to start with a clean slate to map out a program that I thought would influence astronomy for fifty years was more than I could resist."
 |
| Dr. Nancy Grace Roman is shown with a model of the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO) in 1962 (NASA) |
She found her time at NRL had taught her how to work with engineers and translate between the engineers and scientists, which proved very useful at NASA. In the beginning there was no bureaucracy and plenty of funding. She recalled asking the grant office about a certain idea and being told, "Don't ask me what you ca do. Tell me what you want to do. It is up to be to find a way." She was put in charge of the Orbiting Solar Observatories (both the OSO 1 satellite in the top left and a model of the Advanced Orbiting Solar Observatory or AOSO in her hand are part of my portrait), worked on the first gamma-ray telescope, as well as their existing work on geodesy and relativity. As early as 1959 she suggested a space telescope could be used for exoplanet detection, and even suggested a technique employing a rotated coronagraphic mask to block the direct light from stars to resolve bodies which might otherwise been obscured by the glare, as was ultimately used by the Hubble Space Telescope and will soon be used by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. In 1960, she was made the first Chief of Astronomy in NASA's Office of Space Science, and the first woman to hold a NASA executive position. She gave lectures to introduce astronomers to the program and to meet with astronomers to find out what they wanted to research from space. As surprising as it may be today, astronomers were initially skeptical of what NASA could do for their field. She decided that NASA should manage major astronomy projects to benefit the wider scientific community rather than individual projects by scientists. She wrote in 1960, "A fundamental part of all of these plans is the participation of the entire astronomical community. NASA will act as a coordinating agency to enable astronomers to obtain the basic observations they need from outer space." Until peer-review was introduced in 1970, Roman alone judged the merit of all proposals and distributed the science budget. She lead the orbiting astronomical observatories program. The learning curve was steep. The first in a series of optical and ultraviolet telescopes was four years behind schedule and failed three days after reaching orbit in 1966. The OAO-2 launched in 1968 was the first successful space telescope and the OAO-3 Copernicus was very successful from 1972-1981. NASA learned that unforeseen technical problems were inevitable and that it was wise to keep launch dates classified. She oversaw astronomical satellites Uhuru (1970), the gamma-ray telescope Small Astronomy Satellite 2 (1972), x-ray telescope Small Astronomy Satellite 3 (1975), geodetic satellites, the Astronomy Rocket Program, the Scout Probe to measure the relativistic gravity redshift, and experiments on Spacelab, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab. She set up NASA’s scientific ballooning program and the airborne astronomy program starting with a 12 inch (30 cm) telescope on a Learjet in 1968 and the Kuiper Airborne Observatory with a 36 inch (91 cm) telescope on Lockheed C-141A Starlifter jet. She was skeptical it would pass review, but the Cosmic Background Explorer mission began during her tenure, and its results lead to the 2006 Nobel Prize for its leading scientists, as did the Infrared Astronomy Satellite, overseen by Nancy Boggess. She was most proud of the International Ultraviolet Explorer. She fought to collaborate internationally with the UK’s Science and Engineering Research Council and the European Space Agency saying, "IUE was an uphill fight. I don't mean I didn't have some support, but I think I carried it on almost single handedly.”
 |
| Henrietta Swan Leavitt, 9.5" x 12.5" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2010 |
She is most famous for her last major program, the Large Space Telescope which has since been named the Hubble Space Telescope. Though quick to share credit with her many colleagues, Nancy Grace Roman was known as the “mother of Hubble.” Getting above the atmosphere avoids the distortions it causes and allows astronomers to observe a much wider range of frequencies (which otherwise would be filtered out by the atmosphere). A large mirror is required to collect enough light from dim and distant objects. First proposed in 1946 by Lyman Spitzer, the possibility of a 3 m space telescope became more feasible in the 60s with the development of the Saturn V rocket. Roman chose to focus first on the small telescopes of OAO as proof-of-concept for the deployment and remote operation of space telescopes. Some astronomers argued for a moon-based telescope but Roman felt logistics, including the lunar dust were insurmountable. Colleagues from NASA’s Langley Research Center argued for space telescopes with human operators, but Roman considered that absurdly complicated. People need atmospheres to breathe, and the atmosphere was precisely what they were hoping to avoid. But with the success of the OAO she began lecturing on the possibility of a large space telescope. In 1969 NASA commissioned a report from the National Science Foundation which endorsed the idea. With astronomer Charles Robert O'Dell, hired in 1972 to be the Project Scientist, she was the driving force behind the project and developed the standard process by which NASA operates large astronomical projects. She set up the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) to run mission science operations. As the design process continued engineers requested a smaller mirror for technical reasons; Roman argued for a 2.4 m minimum size in order to accurately resolve Cepheid Variables in Virgo. Edwin Hubble had shown that the speed at which distant galaxies recede was proportional to distance, but the proportionality constant was not well determined. Henrietta Swan Leavitt had shown that luminosity of the class of stars called Cepheid Variables was a function of their period of variation. This let astronomers calibrate their distance in the Milky Way, and so if they could resolve these stars in Virgo, they could determine its distance. After convincing NASA and the astronomical community she next tackled policy makers, writing testimony for Congress throughout the 1970s to continue to justify the telescope and convince them to fund it. She invested in detector technology and served on the selection board for Hubble’s science operations. She argued that for the price of a trip to the movies every American would have 15 years of exciting discoveries, to justify the large price tag. Costs ultimately ran much higher, but the Hubble Space Telescope more than doubled this lifespan. Goddard wanted control of the STScI and Hubble science operations but Nancy sided with the astronomical community that it should be their hands; this nearly cost her job and lead to her retirement.
 |
| Roman, posing here in 1966 with a model of the observatory that would become the Hubble Space Telescope (NASA) |
Hubble was scheduled to be flown on the Space Shuttle flight after Challenger; then the Challenger disaster lead to a three year delay. NASA chose to redesign payloads for robotic deployment but Hubble was too far along in its design. It was quite lucky that it could be serviced by the Space Shuttle, which allowed its initial mirror problem to be fixed and later for instruments to be sporadically upgraded, greatly increasing its abilities and lifetime.
This in turn lead to her becoming head of the Astronomical Data Center NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 1995 and working with contractors supporting it until 1997. She spent three years training K-12 science teachers including those for underserved districts and spent ten years recording astronomy textbooks for Reading for the Blind and Dyslexic until her mid-eighties. In 1962 she was awarded with the Federal Women's Award (introduced in 1961 when they realized that the major awards for civil servants were restricted to men) by John F. Kennedy, and was selected as one of Life Magazine's 100 Most Important Young People. She received four honorary doctorates (including one from Swarthmore), NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award (1969), NASA's Outstanding Scientific Leadership Award (1978), the American Astronomical Society's William Randolf Lovelace II Award and Asteroid 2516 was named in her honour. She was frequently recognized for her achievements and her support for women in STEM, but described her 2017 inclusion in the LEGO Women of NASA set as “by far the most fun.” She died in 2018 after a long illness.
References
Nancy Grace Roman, Wikipedia, accessed October 2, 2026
Nancy Grace Roman, Wikipedia, accessed October 2, 2026
Dr. Nancy Grace Roman (1925-2018), NASA website https://science.nasa.gov/people/nancy-roman/, accessed October 4, 2026
Hyman, Randall. How Vera Rubin and Nancy Grace Roman Transformed Astronomy. Astronomy.com, November 30, 2022.
Roman, Nancy Grace. Nancy Grace Roman and the Dawn of Space Astronomy, Annu. Rev. Astron. Atrophy's., 2019, 57: 1-34.
See also: Nancy Grace Roman, The Mother of Hubble - Media Resources, Scientific Visualization Studio, NASA
