Today is my birthday so here is my face! I took this last month at the CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art of Bordeaux. I spent three hours wandering the entire museum alone and it was wonderful.
A photo of Dr. Nancy Grace Roman holding a model of the Hubble Space Telescope.
You have to be a pretty big deal for NASA to name a space telescope after you, and that is certainly the case for Dr. Nancy Grace Roman — our Roman Space Telescope’s namesake. She’s sometimes called the “mother of Hubble,” but she’s really the mother of all space-based observatories and NASA science in general. As NASA’s first chief astronomer, Dr. Roman's vision and leadership supercharged space science and helped make NASA the world-class scientific institution it is today.
Nancy Grace Roman as a young child.
Nancy Grace Roman was born on May 16, 1925 in Nashville, Tennessee. She was naturally curious about the world, a trait she attributed to taking nature walks with her mother as a child. By seventh grade, she had decided that she was going to be an astronomer.
She later recounted, “I certainly did not receive any encouragement. I was told from the beginning that women could not be scientists.”
A 1972 photo of Dr. Roman at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Nancy received her bachelor’s in astronomy from Swarthmore College in 1946 and her doctorate in astronomy from the University of Chicago in 1949. She specialized in spectral classification, which involves spreading starlight out into a rainbow to see the individual colors. She would decode these rainbows to learn about the temperature and brightness of the stars, and their distances and movements.
In 1959, just six months after NASA was founded, someone at the agency asked Dr. Roman if she knew someone who might be interested in creating a space-based astronomy program. She sure did — she applied for the job herself, and she got it!
Dr. Roman works with a model of the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO).
Creating a whole space program from scratch was no small feat. Dr. Roman quickly set her sights on the stars, determined to make space-based telescopes a reality.
Scientists had been batting around the idea of Hubble for generations. Today, after more than three decades in orbit and thousands of discoveries, it’s hard to believe that Hubble was ever a contentious idea. But in the mid-20th century, a budget-starved NASA and a post-World War II government were hesitant to follow the ambitious ideal of a giant new telescope.
But Dr. Roman knew how transformative it would be to observe the cosmos from above Earth’s turbulent atmosphere, which blurs images from even the best ground-based telescopes. So she gathered astronomers from around the country and sat them down in a room with NASA engineers to hash out the possibilities.
Then she championed the idea to Congress, saying that “for the price of one night at the movies each year, each American would receive 15 years of exciting discoveries.” (And she actually undersold it, since we’ve now received over 36 years of discoveries from Hubble!)
In this 1965 photo, Dr. Roman (center) conducts a demonstration with Smith College students during a visit to NASA.
With leadership experience stretching back to at least the fifth or sixth grade, when she organized her friends into an astronomy club, Dr. Roman paired a personable approach with unwavering commitment to the mission, regardless of who or what stood in her way. And now we have her to thank for not just Hubble but for every other space telescope that has followed.
A portrait of Dr. Roman with the Stratoscope II balloon in the background.
In less than a month, the observatory named in Dr. Roman’s honor will journey to the heavens to transform our view of the universe. Read more about the woman behind the mission’s name here: https://science.nasa.gov/people/nancy-roman/. Follow along with Roman’s road to launch at nasa.gov/roman, and virtually tour the Roman observatory here.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!
My one boring tip to anyone in their 20s is to resist the temptation to rot in your room every time you get a free moment. Dismiss any neuroses you have about going outside and "being perceived". Be a dictator about it, plan your hangouts like they are binding commitments. No excuses! Go to the bar with your friends. Be kinda hungover at work. Socializing is like exercise; even if you don't feel like you want to, you should still do it because it's good for you.
socializing works a little bit like a car battery and alternator. if you continue to make yourself go out and do things, your social alternator makes it infinitely more manageable for you to continue to go out and do things. if you let yourself be completely idle for too long, the alternator doesn't get to keep charging your battery and eventually it runs completely down and it's nearly impossible to go out and do stuff with a dead social battery. you can always get it jumped again by a friend who's willing to do so, but as with a real car battery it's kind of a whole Thing and the first time out with a jumped battery is still really shaky and weird and anxiety-inducing and all of this could've been avoided if you'd just gone to the arcade or whatever
