As the Hubble Space Telescope continues to deliver compelling science 30 years after its deployment, it’s important to acknowledge a key contributor to the mission’s success. As NASA’s first chief of astronomy programs, Nancy Grace Roman (1925–2018) shepherded some 20 spaceborne astronomical missions in the 1960s and 1970s. Her longest-lasting effort was to help establish a large diffraction-limited orbiting space telescope, an instrument that took several names before it became Hubble. Today Roman is warmly remembered by her colleagues and followers as one of the central players who turned that decades-old dream into reality.
Roman received a PhD in astronomy from the University of Chicago in 1949 and began her career in research at the school’s Yerkes Observatory. Though it was not highly appreciated at the time, Roman made a significant contribution to our understanding of galaxy evolution by finding a correlation between a star’s motion and its abundance of heavy metals. Concerned that a woman would not be able to advance beyond low-level positions at Yerkes, Roman decided to leave academe for work at government facilities, first at the Naval Research Laboratory and then, in 1959, at the newly established NASA.
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NASA hired Roman to set up a program in space astronomy, with the goal of using balloons, aircraft, and ultimately satellites to conduct astronomical observations above Earth’s atmospheric haze. She faced daunting challenges, not least of which was to help two very different groups of people learn to talk to one another. First there was the rapidly growing NASA infrastructure of engineers, managers, and scientists who, faced with the embarrassment of Sputnik, wanted to achieve new technical firsts in space. Then there were the astronomers. Most of them were skeptical about spending so much money on space telescopes; the few enthusiasts, on the other hand, were so gung-ho that they were campaigning for swift work on the largest possible space observatory.
One of Roman’s first duties at NASA was to make official visits to astronomy departments across the country to promote the advantages of spaceflight. Early on she visited Princeton, where Lyman Spitzer Jr was the department chair and director of the observatory. Spitzer had long envisioned space telescopes and was then, with his department colleagues, fostering a series of balloon flights lofting telescopes into the high atmosphere. Roman’s visit encouraged him to approach NASA not only for his team’s latest “flying telescope” balloon system, the 36-inch Stratoscope II, but also for what in 1972 would become NASA’s third Orbiting Astronomical Observatory, a 32-inch spectrophotometric instrument dubbed Copernicus.
Spitzer saw those efforts as leading to a flagship space telescope, and Roman more than agreed. She encouraged feasibility studies that brought NASA technical and engineering staff into contact with astronomers to craft strong arguments for a continuous, stepwise sequence of practical programs—from balloon-borne telescopes to small orbiting instruments to the ultimate goal of a fully diffraction-limited 120-inch Large Space Telescope.
As attention turned in the 1970s to the specifications of the large telescope, Roman was in the middle of the debate. She encouraged a focus on practical details like adequate pointing and setting controls and advocated a free-flying instrument, rather than one connected to a crewed space station and employing film return. This brought up the question of the best way to record and return data. Once again Roman was at the cusp, advocating solid-state sensors over soon-to-be-outdated electronographic detectors and vidicons.
Underscoring all the design deliberations was the big question of the size of the telescope. The debate seemed endless until Roman teamed up with project scientist C. R. O’Dell and directed the Space Telescope’s Science Working Group to come up with minimum operational standards. Roman knew she needed to balance the scientific goals, the engineering challenges, and, most critically, the costs; she was keenly aware that there were limits to what Congress might accept and, frankly, what could be launched by the new space shuttle program, which NASA had committed itself to in the post-Apollo years. Roman and other key players finally decided that the planned 120-inch mirror had to be reduced to 94 inches, a scale that had already proved effective for spy satellites.
The decision did not relieve the program from pressures, both political and scientific, to further downsize or even cancel the project. One way Roman responded was to expand the telescope’s user base. She knew that the planetary sciences community was not happy with what it perceived was a lack of support from NASA. She also knew that one of the major proposals for the telescope’s wide-field imaging system included the option of a dual-mode camera for imaging planetary surfaces. She thus advocated for planetary imaging, which expanded not only the telescope’s capacity but also its circle of scientific supporters.
As Robert Smith observed in his comprehensive history of the mission, Roman “showed herself to be a hard infighter who was not overly concerned with bruising egos in her support for programs.” One of her last battles before retirement in 1979 was to ardently support the establishment of an independent institute—what would become the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland—to manage the scientific aspects of the mission.
During retirement, Roman remained active on many fronts, consulting, lecturing on astronomy, campaigning for women in science, advising, and returning to some of the unfinished astronomical research she enjoyed so much. Looking back on her career and life in 2016 in Science, she took pride in both becoming a research astronomer and subsequently leaving research to set up “a program that I thought would influence astronomy for decades to come.”
David DeVorkin is senior curator of history of astronomy and the space sciences at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. The transcript of a 1980 oral history of Roman conducted by DeVorkin is available online through the Niels Bohr Library and Archives of the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today.
