Nancy Grace Roman, astronomer celebrated as ‘mother’ of Hubble, dies at 93

When Nancy Grace Roman requested 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.”

“Otherwise,” she said, “I could not get past the secretaries.”

After joining the fledgling space agency in 1959, Roman became the first chief of astronomy at NASA headquarters, a role that made her one of the agency’s first female executives. She remained in that position for nearly two decades before her retirement in 1979.

Roman, who was celebrated as a trailblazer for female scientists and a driving force behind advances including the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, died Dec. 25 at a hospital in Germantown, Maryland. She was 93. A cousin, Laura Bates Verreau, confirmed the death but said she did not yet know the cause.

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 from that.”

NASA credited her with leading what it described as the agency’s “first successful astronomical mission,” the launch of Orbiting Solar Observatory-1 in 1962 to measure the electromagnetic radiation of the sun, among other things.