Pioneering astronomer celebrated as ‘mother’ of the Hubble space telescope

Nancy Roman astronomer b May 16, 1925 d December 26, 2018

‘‘I am glad I ignored the many people who told me that I could not be an astronomer.’’

When Nancy Roman, who has died aged 93, asked permission to take a second algebra course in high school, a teacher demanded to know "what lady would take mathematics instead of Latin". In college, a professor remarked that he often tried to dissuade women from majoring in physics. And after receiving a doctorate in astronomy, she concluded that a female professor in the field had little hope of obtaining tenure.

Undeterred by the barriers to women in the sciences, Roman found a professional home at Nasa. Even there, she recalled in an interview years later, she felt compelled to use the honorific "Dr". "Otherwis," she said, "I could not get past the secretaries."

After joining the fledgling space agency in 1959, Roman became its first chief of astronomy, a role that made her one of its first female executives. She remained in that position for nearly two decades before her retirement in 1979. She was celebrated as a trailblazer for female scientist and a driving force behind advances including the launch of the Hubble space telescope.

Roman spent much of her career helping develop, fund and promote technology that would help scientists see more clearly beyond Earth's atmosphere. "Astronomers had been wanting to get observations from above the atmosphere for a long time. Looking through the atmosphere is somewhat like looking through a piece of old, stained glass," Roman told Voice of America in 2011. "The glass has defects in it, so the image is blurred ..."

Nasa credited her with leading what it described as its "first successful astronomical missing": the launch of Orbiting Solor Observatory-1 in 1962 to measure the electromagnetic radiation of the Sun, among other things. She also co-ordinated among scientists and engineers for the successful launch of geodetic satellites, used for measuring and mapping Earth, and several orbiting astronomical observatories.

But she was perhaps most associated with the early legwork for the Hubble space telescope. Hubble is widely considered to have yielded the most significant astronomical observations since Galileo began using a telescope in the early 1600s.

The design and launch of Hubble was fraught by scientific, financial and bureaucratic difficulties that Roman worked to resolve. Lobbying for funding for Hubble, whose prices tag reached US$1.5 billion, she recalled arguing that every American, for the cost of one ticket to the movies, could be assured years of scientific discoveries.

‘‘During the 1960 sand early 1970 st here was no-one at Nasa who was more important in getting the first designs and concepts for Hubble funded and completed,’’ space historian Robert Zimmerman wrote in The Universe in a Mirror , an account of the creation of Hubble. ‘‘More importantly, it was [Roman] more than anyone who convinced the astronomical community to get behind space astronomy.’’

The telescope did not launch until 1990, more than a decade after Roman retired, but when it did, its photographs of the cosmos electrified the world.

In 1994, when Nasa announced the repair of a faulty mirror and other problems that had caused its early photographs to be blurry, Roman was in the audience, knitting. Edward Weiler, then Hubble’s chief scientist, surprised her by recognising her publicly, according to Zimmerman’s account. ‘‘If [astrophysicist] Lyman Spitzer was the father of the Hubble space telescope,’’ Weiler said, ‘‘then Nancy Roman was its mother.’’

Nancy Grace Roman was born in Nashville, Tennessee. Her father was a geophysicist with the US Geological Survey. Her mother was a former music teacher, who would take her daughter outside at night to view the stars.

After early work at the University of Chicago and the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, she was hired by the Naval Research Laboratory in 1955, working in radio astronomy. Nasa was formed three years later, with Roman among its earliest employees. She spent the final part of her career at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where she oversaw the Astronomical Data Centre.

Her work was recognised by Nasa in 1969 with its Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award. In 2017 she was rendered in plastic by Lego, as part of its ‘‘Women of Nasa’’ set. She left no surviving family.

‘‘I am glad,’’ she once told Science magazine, ‘‘I ignored the many people who told me that I could not be an astronomer.’’ – Washington Post