Nancy Grace Roman (May 16, 1925 – December 25, 2018) was an American astronomer who made important contributions to stellar classification and stellar motions. The first female executive at NASA, Roman served as NASA's first chief of astronomy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, establishing her as one of the "visionary founders of the US civilian space program".
Roman created NASA's space astronomy program and is known to many as the "Mother of Hubble" for her foundational role in planning the Hubble Space Telescope. Throughout her career, Roman was an active public speaker and educator, and an advocate for women in the sciences.
In May 2020, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine announced that the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope would be named the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in recognition of her enduring contributions to astronomy.
Early life
Nancy Grace Roman was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to music teacher Georgia Frances Smith Roman and physicist/mathematician Irwin Roman. Her father took a job as a geophysicist for an oil company and the family moved to Oklahoma three months after Roman's birth. Roman and her parents later moved to Texas, New Jersey, Michigan, and then Nevada in 1936, when her father joined the Civil Service in geophysical research.
When she was about 12 years old, the family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, when Irwin Roman was hired as Senior Geophysicist at the Baltimore office of the U.S. Geological Survey. Roman considered her parents to be major influences in her interest in science.
When Roman was 11 years old, she formed an astronomy club, gathering with classmates once a week and learning about constellations from books. Although discouraged by those around her, Roman knew by seventh grade that she would dedicate her life to astronomy. She attended Western High School in Baltimore where she participated in an accelerated program, graduating in three years.
Education
Swarthmore
Roman attended Swarthmore College, intending to study astronomy. The dean of women was not encouraging in this. Roman said "if you insisted on majoring in science or engineering, she wouldn't have anything more to do with you". The dean referred her to the astronomy department, then chaired by Peter van de Kamp, who was initially discouraging, but did teach her astronomy. She worked on the two student telescopes that had previously been defunct. Roman says that helped with "getting a feel for instruments and instrumentation and just having the fun of playing around with observing techniques."
In her sophomore year, Roman began working at the Sproul Observatory processing astronomical photographic plates, inheriting Van de Kamp's ethos that since he had used "plates taken by his predecessors 50 years earlier," he felt obliged "to replace those with plates that his successors would use 50 years in the future". Van de Kamp taught Roman in a solo lecture course on astrometry, encouraging her to learn about professional astronomy through use of the astronomy library. She graduated in February 1946, and van de Kamp suggested that she continue studies at the University of Chicago, which was rebuilding its astronomy department after World War II. Years later, Roman remained involved with her alma mater, serving on the Swarthmore Board of Managers from 1980 to 1988.
Chicago/Yerkes
Roman started graduate school at the University of Chicago in March 1946. Finding the classes easier than at Swarthmore, she approached three professors, Otto Struve, George van Biesbroeck, and William Wilson Morgan, asking each for an observational astronomy project to work on. The first gave her a theory project, the second a data analysis project, and Morgan provided an observational project using a telescope, most likely the refractor from the Kenwood Astrophysical Observatory. Although Morgan was initially dismissive of Roman, at one point not speaking to her for six months, he continued to support her research. She received her Ph.D. in astronomy in 1949, having written a dissertation on the Ursa Major Moving Group.
After a two-month break at the Warner and Swasey Observatory, Roman was invited by Morgan to be his research associate at Yerkes Observatory. She worked at Yerkes for six years, traveling frequently to the McDonald Observatory in Texas (which at the time was managed by the University of Chicago), and once to the David Dunlap Observatory in Toronto, supported by the Office of Naval Research. The research position was not permanent, so Roman became an instructor and later, an assistant professor.
At Yerkes, Roman's research focused on stellar spectroscopy, emphasizing F and G type stars and high-velocity stars. Her work produced some of the most highly-cited papers of the time, including, in 1950, three top-100 papers in a single year, with over 3,000 citations. She was offered research positions at Wayne State University and the University of Southern California, but turned them down because she felt those institutions lacked sufficient astronomical instrumentation, an issue of great importance to her.
Roman visited Argonne National Laboratory in order to use their new astrometry device for measuring photographic plates, but was unable to convince Yerkes to acquire one. In 1954, she advocated for the purchase of a then-novel digital computer for data analysis, but was turned down by department chair Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who declared computers not useful for this purpose. Roman eventually left her job at the university because of the scarcity of tenured research positions available to women; the university had never appointed a woman to the academic staff. Gerard Kuiper recommended to her a position at the Naval Research Laboratory in the new field of radio astronomy.
Professional work
Research career
Roman conducted a survey of all naked-eye stars similar to the Sun and realized that they could be divided into two categories by chemical content and motion through the galaxy. One of her discoveries was that stars with smaller amounts of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium move faster than stars that have more heavy elements. Another discovery was finding that not all common stars were the same age. That was proven by comparing hydrogen lines of the low dispersion spectra in the stars.
Roman noticed that the stars with the stronger lines moved closer to the center of the Milky Way and the others moved in more elliptical patterns, off the plane of the galaxy. These fundamental observations of the structure of the galaxy provided the first clue to its formation and laid the foundation for later work. Her paper was selected as one of the 100 most important papers in 100 years by the Astrophysical Journal.
While working at Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago, Roman observed the star AG Draconis and discovered that its emission spectrum had completely changed since earlier observations. She later credited the publication of her discovery as a stroke of luck—the star is in that state only 2–3% of the time—that substantially raised her profile within the astronomical community, advancing her career.
In 1955, the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series published her catalog of high-velocity stars, which documented new "spectral types, photoelectric magnitudes and colors, and spectroscopic parallaxes for about 600 high-velocity stars." Her "UV excess" method became widely used by astronomers to find stars with more heavy elements using only the colors of the stars rather than having to take spectra. In 1959, Roman wrote a paper on the detection of exoplanets. She also did research and published on the subjects of locating constellations from their 1875.0 positions.
Naval Research Laboratory
After leaving the University of Chicago, Roman went to the Naval Research Laboratory and entered the radio astronomy program in 1954. Radio astronomy was then a very young field in the United States, and the NRL had taken an early lead by building the largest accurate radio telescope in 1951, a parabolic antenna located on top of one of its research buildings. Roman's work at the NRL included radio astronomy, geodesy, and even the propagation of sound underwater. She spent three years there, rising to become head of the microwave spectroscopy section of the radio astronomy program.
One of the few people at the NRL in radio astronomy with a classical astronomy background, she was consulted on a wide variety of topics. During Roman's time at the NRL, she provided astronomy consultation for the Project Vanguard satellite program, although she did not formally work on any of the rocket projects. However, her consultations introduced her to space astronomy. At the time, she was concerned that the science being done in the rocket projects was not of high quality, though she saw the potential of space astronomy.
Roman's radio astronomy work included mapping much of the Milky Way galaxy at a frequency of 440 MHz, determining the spectral break in the nonthermal radio emission. She pioneered the use of radio astronomy in geodetic work, including radar ranging to improve our calculation of the distance to the Moon at a wavelength of 10 cm (2.86 GHz). Roman presented this at a geodesy conference in 1959 as the best way to determine the mass of the Earth.
While at the NRL, Roman received an invitation to speak on her work with stars in Armenia, then in the Soviet Union, in 1956 for the dedication of the Byurakan Observatory. This cemented her international reputation, and she was the first civilian to visit Armenia after the start of the Cold War. The visit raised her visibility in the United States, with invitations to speak about the trip leading to a series of astronomy lectures. Her reputation was well established, including with people at the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
NASA
At a lecture by Harold Urey at NASA, Roman was approached by Jack Clark, who asked whether she knew someone interested in creating a program for space astronomy at NASA. She interpreted that as an invitation to apply and was the applicant who accepted the position. While the position nominally allowed for 20% of her time to be used for scientific research, she recognized that such a position would effectively mean she was giving up research, but, as she said in 2018, "the chance to start with a clean slate to map out a program that I thought would influence astronomy for fifty years was more than I could resist."
Roman arrived at NASA in late February 1959 as Head of Observational Astronomy. She quickly inherited a broad program which included the Orbiting Solar Observatories and geodesy and relativity. In early 1960, Roman became the first astronomer in the position of Chief of Astronomy in NASA's Office of Space Science, setting up the initial program; she was also the first woman to hold an executive position at the space agency.
Part of her job was traveling throughout the country and giving lectures at astronomy departments, where she discussed the fact that the program was in development. Roman also was looking to find out what other astronomers wanted to study and to educate them on the advantages of observing from space. Her visits set the precedent that NASA scientific research would be driven by the needs of the broader astronomical community, or in her words, the visits were "to tell them what we were planning at NASA and what the NASA opportunities were, but it was equally to try to get from them a feeling of what they thought NASA ought to be doing."