Ok like. Imagine life without ads. You wake up, check your messages across a variety of apps, no ads. You get up and put on the tv while you prep your breakfast, no ads. Maybe you drive somewhere and switch on the radio, no ads. Maybe you drive a long distance, yet somehow, not a single billboard on your path. You pick up a newspaper or magazine to pass the time, no advertisements only articles. You turn on your game console, the home screen is just about your games, no ads to buy more. You open a streaming app, you don't pay extra for no ads, there's just no ads ever.
Think about how much of your time is spent looking at ads. "Download ublock" yeah I know, I have. But that doesn't change that the world is covered with endless advertising. Imagine never seeing that again. How much better our lives would be.
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.
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‘project hail mary is about the power of friendship’ ‘project hail mary is about hope’ ‘project hail mary is about accidentally becoming too important at work’ wrong wrong wrong you’re all wrong. project hail mary is about what it would take for a single man in his 30s to own a fully paid off beachfront property in today’s economy
Part of the reason I'm so adamant about encouraging people to get comfortable with bugs, my own interests aside, is because we cannot have a bright, solarpunk future without them.
A green future is not a bugless future. It is, in fact, a fairly bugful future. If you care about ecological stability, then you need to start with bugs, because they're the most at risk with our current use of pesticides.
Remember when Xbox was going to basically ban used games for the xbox one, and Playstation made fun of them with that video titled "how to share games on Playstation" and it was just one guy handing another a game disk? And now Playstation is getting rid of physical disks entirely
I don't want my cellphone to have AI I want it to have 3 days of battery time. I don't want my computer to have AI preinstalled I want it to have seven usb ports and high ram at affordable price. I don't want my games to have AI built levels I want them to be so optimized I could run them on a nokia.
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