54 Facts About Nancy Roman

Nancy Grace Roman was an American astronomer who made important contributions to stellar classification and motions.

The first female executive at NASA, Roman served as NASA's first Chief of Astronomy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, establishing her as one of the "visionary founders of the US civilian space program".

Nancy Roman created NASA's space astronomy program and is known to many as the "Mother of Hubble" for her foundational role in planning the Hubble Space Telescope.

When she was about 12 years old, the family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, when Irwin Nancy Roman was hired as Senior Geophysicist at the Baltimore office of the US Geological Survey.

Nancy Roman considered her parents to be major influences in her interest in science.

When Nancy Roman was 11 years old, she formed an astronomy club, gathering with classmates once a week and learning about constellations from books.

Nancy Roman attended Western High School in Baltimore where she participated in an accelerated program, graduating in three years.

Nancy Roman worked on the two student telescopes available there, which had been defunct.

Nancy Roman graduated in February 1946, and van de Kamp suggested that she continue studies at the University of Chicago, which was rebuilding its astronomy department after World War II.

Years later, Nancy Roman remained involved with her alma mater, serving on the Swarthmore Board of Managers from 1980 to 1988.

Nancy Roman started graduate school at the University of Chicago in March 1946.

Nancy Roman worked at Yerkes for six years, often traveling to the McDonald Observatory in Texas, which at the time was managed by the University of Chicago, and once to the David Dunlap Observatory in Toronto, supported by the Office of Naval Research.

The research position was not permanent, so Nancy Roman became an instructor and later, an assistant professor.

Nancy Roman's work produced some of the most highly cited papers of the time, including, in 1950, three top-100 papers in a year with over 3,000 publications She was offered research positions at Wayne State University and the University of Southern California, but turned them down as she felt the institutions lacked sufficient astronomical instrumentation, an issue of great importance to her.

Nancy Roman traveled to Argonne National Laboratory to use their new astrometry device for measuring photographic plates, but was unable to convince Yerkes to acquire one; she advocated for the purchase of a then-novel digital computer for data analysis in 1954, but was turned down by department chair Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who declared computers as unuseful for this purpose.

Nancy Roman eventually left her job at the university because of the paucity of tenured research positions available to women; they had never had a woman on the academic staff.

Nancy Roman conducted a survey of all naked-eye stars similar to the Sun and realized that they could be divided into two categories by chemical content and motion through the galaxy.

Nancy Roman noticed that the stars with the stronger lines moved closer to the center of the Milky Way and the others moved in more elliptical patterns, off of the plane of the galaxy.

In 1959, Nancy Roman wrote a paper on the detection of extraterrestrial planets.

Nancy Roman did research and published on the subjects of locating constellations from their 1875.0 positions.

Nancy Roman spent three years there, rising to become head of the microwave spectroscopy section of the radio astronomy program.

Nancy Roman presented this at a geodesy conference in 1959 as the best way to determine the mass of the Earth.

Nancy Roman's reputation was well established, including with people at the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

At a lecture by Harold Urey at NASA, Nancy Roman was approached by Jack Clark, who asked whether she knew someone interested in creating a program for space astronomy at NASA.

Nancy Roman interpreted that as an invitation to apply and was the applicant who accepted the position.

Nancy Roman quickly inherited a broad program which included the Orbiting Solar Observatories and geodesy and relativity.

In early 1960, Nancy Roman became the first astronomer in the position of Chief of Astronomy in NASA's Office of Space Science, setting up the initial program; she was the first woman to hold an executive position at the space agency.

Nancy Roman was looking to find out what other astronomers wanted to study and to educate them on the advantages of observing from space.

Nancy Roman established the policy that major astronomy projects would be managed by NASA for the good of the broader scientific community, rather than as individual experiments run by academic research scientists.

Nancy Roman believed as early as 1980 that the future Hubble would be able to detect Jupiter exoplanets by astrometry; this was successful in 2002 when astronomers characterized a previously discovered planet around the star Gliese 876.

Nancy Roman's position became Chief of Astronomy and Solar Physics at NASA from 1961 to 1963.

Nancy Roman held various other positions in NASA, including Chief of Astronomy and Relativity.

Nancy Roman led, from 1959, the orbiting astronomical observatories program, working with engineer Dixon Ashworth, initially a series of optical and ultraviolet telescopes.

Nancy Roman continued to develop Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2, launched in December 1968, which became the first successful space telescope.

Nancy Roman oversaw the development and launch of the three small astronomical satellites: the X-ray explorer Uhuru in 1970 with Riccardo Giacconi, the gamma-ray telescope Small Astronomy Satellite 2 in 1972, and the multi-instrument X-ray telescope Small Astronomy Satellite 3 in 1975.

Nancy Roman planned for other smaller programs such as the Astronomy Rocket Program, the Scout Probe to measure the relativistic gravity redshift, programs for high energy astronomy observatories, and other experiments on Spacelab, Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab.

Nancy Roman was known to be blunt in her dealings, or as Robert Zimmerman put it, "her hard-nosed and realistic manner of approving or denying research projects had made her disliked by many in the astronomical community".

Nancy Roman worked with Jack Holtz, on the small astronomy satellite and Don Burrowbridge on the space telescope.

Nancy Roman set up NASA's scientific ballooning program, inheriting the Stratoscope balloon projects led by Martin Schwarzschild from the ONR and the National Science Foundation.

The last program in which Nancy Roman was highly involved was the Hubble Space Telescope, then referred to as the Large Space Telescope.

Nancy Roman felt that even the modest 12 inch telescopes of OAO-2, which did not launch until 1968, were a major leap forward, not least because the development of suitable pointing control systems was a major technological hurdle.

In 1971 Nancy Roman set up the Science Steering Group for the Large Space Telescope, and appointed both NASA engineers and astronomers from all over the country to serve on it, for the express purpose of designing a free-floating space observatory that could meet the community's needs but would be feasible for NASA to implement.

Nancy Roman was very involved with the early planning and specifically, the setting up of the program structure.

Nancy Roman invested in detector technology, resulting in the Hubble being the first major observatory to use Charge-Coupled Device detectors.

Nancy Roman said, "which is often forgotten by our younger generation of astronomers who make their careers by using Hubble Space Telescope".

Nancy Roman was interested in learning computer programming, and so audited a course on FORTRAN at Montgomery College that garnered her a job as a consultant for ORI, Inc from 1980 to 1988.

Nancy Roman continued her work until 1997 for contractors who supported the Goddard Space Flight Center.

Nancy Roman then spent three years teaching advanced junior high and high school students and K-12 science teachers, including those in underserved districts, and then spent ten years recording astronomical textbooks for Reading for the Blind and Dyslexic.

Outside her work, Nancy Roman enjoyed going to lectures and concerts and was active in the American Association of University Women.

Nancy Roman died on December 25,2018, following a long illness.

Nancy Roman was discouraged from going into astronomy by people around her.

Nancy Roman attended courses entitled, "Women in Management", in Michigan and at Penn State to learn about issues regarding being a woman in a management position.

However, Nancy Roman stated in an interview in 1980 that the courses were dissatisfying and addressed women's interests rather than women's problems.

In recognition of her advancement of women in senior science management, Nancy Roman received recognitions from several women's organizations, including the Women's Education and Industrial Union, the Ladies' Home Journal magazine, Women in Aerospace, the Women's History Museum, and the American Association of University Women.