This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch this weekend aboard a SpaceX rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. When it becomes operational early next year, it will transform our view of the universe.
With a mirror the same size as the one in the Hubble Space Telescope but a field of view more than 100 times larger, NASA's newest tool is designed to survey vast swaths of sky quickly. It will hunt for dark energy's fingerprints and detect perhaps 100,000 exoplanets. In August 2018, just four months before she died on Dec. 25, I had the great fortune to fly from Sydney to Washington, D.C., to interview the woman this telescope is named after.
She was 93 years old, and over the hours we spent talking, she shared her remarkable life story. Nancy Grace Roman was born on May 16, 1925, in Nashville, Tennessee, and grew up captivated by the night sky. Her mother, Georgia Frances Smith Roman, encouraged this early curiosity, walking with her young daughter to point out constellations and the aurora borealis.
By age 11, Roman—never Nancy!—had already organized an astronomy club among her classmates in Reno, Nevada, where the family briefly lived. By high school, she had decided, against the advice of nearly everyone around her, that she wanted to become a professional astronomer. That ambition ran headlong into the sexism of 20th-century academia.
When Roman asked her high school guidance counselor for permission to take a second year of algebra instead of yet more Latin, the counselor reportedly asked her, "What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?" She took the math anyway. She went on to Swarthmore College, where she earned a bachelor's degree in astronomy in 1946, and then to the University of Chicago, where she completed a Ph.D. in astronomy in 1949. Her doctoral research focused on stellar dynamics and the motions of stars in the Milky Way, work that would foreshadow her lifelong interest in stellar populations and galactic structure.
After earning her doctorate, Roman remained at the University of Chicago and worked at the Yerkes Observatory, where she conducted research on stellar spectroscopy. This is the technique of spreading a star's light into a rainbow and then analyzing faint features in the spectrum. She made a name for herself with a landmark 1955 paper demonstrating a correlation between a star's motion through the Milky Way and its chemical composition.
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