When NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on August 30, 2026, they honored an extraordinary woman leader. Dr. Roman was the first Chief of Astronomy at NASA and its first female executive, the first female faculty member in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, and the first woman to lead a major NASA science program. For twenty years she was the driving force behind creation of the Hubble Space Telescope, which forever changed our understanding of the universe, an effort that earned Dr. Roman the nickname “The Mother of Hubble.”
Yet her path through the halls of academe and government service wasn’t easy. As a young girl, her interest in math and science were treated as anomalies. Undeterred, she graduated from Swarthmore with a degree in Astronomy and went on to earn a PhD at the University of Chicago. Her research on stellar composition as a junior faculty member at U-C laid the groundwork for our current understanding of the Milky Way. When the university opted not to grant her tenure, she joined the staff of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. instead. A fledgling agency named NASA recruited her to sign up in 1959, just a few months after beginning operations.
At NASA, Dr. Roman led their program of space-based astronomical observation, which culminated in launching the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. Space-based astronomical observation uses telescopes mounted on orbiting satellites to study the skies versus observing the stars from telescopes on Earth. Being free of interference from Earth’s atmosphere has given us far clearer pictures and far more information about space, which has revolutionized our knowledge of worlds beyond our own.
Although Dr. Roman is most closely associated with the Hubble project, the new space telescope bearing her name will be far more powerful than the Hubble. The Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope will have a field of view 100 times larger than Hubble’s and is expected to measure the light from a billion galaxies in its lifetime. It will also allow us to observe and inventory exoplanets, or planets existing outside our solar system. Finally, it will explore unanswered questions about dark matter and dark energy, transforming our understanding of the universe.
Thank you, Dr. Roman, for modeling—to infinity and beyond—what determined women leaders can achieve.
