Research career 's first Chief of Astronomy, is shown at NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, around 1972. 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'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." Her work was instrumental in converting what was then a ground-based astronomical community, hostile to the space science program, into supporters of astronomy from space. She established the policy that major astronomy projects would be managed by NASA for the good of the broader scientific community, rather than as individual experiments run by academic research scientists. As early as 1960, a year into her new position, Roman began publishing plans for NASA astronomy with policy statements, such as "A fundamental part of all of these plans is the participation of the entire astronomical community. NASA will act as a coordinating agency to enable astronomers to obtain the basic observations they need from outer space." During her employment at NASA, Roman developed and prepared the budgets for various programs and she organized their scientific participation. From 1959 through the 1970s, when the introduction of peer review brought in outside expertise, she was the sole individual accepting or rejecting proposals for NASA astronomy projects based on their merit and her own knowledge. In 1959, Roman proposed, perhaps for the first time, that detecting planets around other stars might be possible using a space-based telescope, and even suggested a technique employing a rotated
coronagraphic mask; a similar approach was ultimately used with the Hubble Space Telescope to image the possible exoplanet Fomalhaut B (ref K.) and will be used by the
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to image exoplanets similar to the giant planets in the Solar System. She also believed as early as 1980 that the future Hubble would be able to detect
Jupiter exoplanets by astrometry; this was successful in 2002 when astronomers characterized a previously discovered planet around the star
Gliese 876. in 1962 Roman's position became Chief of Astronomy and
Solar Physics at NASA from 1961 to 1963. During this time, she oversaw the development of the
Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO) program, developing and launching OSO 1 in May 1962 and developing OSO 2, (February 1965) and OSO 3 (March 1967). She held various other positions in NASA, including Chief of Astronomy and
Relativity. satellite, launched in 1972 and nicknamed Copernicus. This is a publicity picture; she never actually worked in the Goddard control room. She also led, from 1959, the
orbiting astronomical observatories (OAO) program, working with engineer Dixon Ashworth, initially a series of optical and ultraviolet telescopes. The first, OAO-1, was slated to be launched in 1962, but technical difficulties resulted in a descoped version launched in 1966, but which failed three days after reaching orbit. Roman explained these problems by analogy in 2018: She continued to develop
Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2, launched in December 1968, which became the first successful space telescope. OAO-3, named Copernicus, was a highly successful ultraviolet telescope which operated from 1972 to 1981. Roman oversaw the development and launch of the three small astronomical satellites: the X-ray explorer
Uhuru (satellite) in 1970 with
Riccardo Giacconi, the gamma-ray telescope
Small Astronomy Satellite 2 in 1972, and the multi-instrument X-ray telescope
Small Astronomy Satellite 3 in 1975. Other projects she oversaw included four geodetic satellites. She planned for other smaller programs such as the Astronomy Rocket Program, the Scout Probe to measure the relativistic gravity redshift, programs for high energy astronomy observatories, and other experiments on
Spacelab,
Gemini,
Apollo, and
Skylab. Roman was known to be blunt in her dealings, or as Robert Zimmerman put it, "her hard-nosed and realistic manner of approving or denying research projects had made her disliked by many in the astronomical community". This was very much in evidence in the early 1960s when she terminated the relativity program, which at the time consisted of three separate projects, when the
Pound-Rebka experiment achieved better accuracy than was projected for the space-based projects. in 2017 Roman worked with Jack Holtz, on the small astronomy satellite and Don Burrowbridge on the space telescope. She set up NASA's scientific ballooning program, inheriting the
Stratoscope balloon projects led by
Martin Schwarzschild from the
ONR and the
National Science Foundation. Roman led the development of NASA's airborne astronomy program, beginning with a 12-inch telescope in a
Learjet in 1968 and followed in 1974 by the
Kuiper Airborne Observatory with a 36-inch telescope, opening up the obscured
infrared region of the spectrum for astronomical observations to researchers such as
Frank J. Low. Other long wavelength missions started during her tenure were the
Cosmic Background Explorer, which, although she was initially unconvinced would be able to pass review garnered the
Nobel Prize in 2006 for two of its leading scientists, and the
Infrared Astronomy Satellite, both of which were overseen by
Nancy Boggess, who Roman had hired in 1968 to help manage the growing portfolio of astronomy missions. Roman was instrumental in NASA's acceptance of partnership in the
International Ultraviolet Explorer, which she felt was her greatest success, saying, "IUE was an uphill fight. I don't mean I didn't have some support, but I think I carried it on almost single handedly." . While listed as a 1966 photo, this design was not the standard until the mid-1970s. The last program in which Roman was highly involved was the
Hubble Space Telescope, then referred to as the Large Space Telescope (LST). While a large telescope in space had been proposed by
Lyman Spitzer in 1946, and astronomers became interested in a 3m-class space telescope in the early 1960s as the
Saturn V rocket was being developed, Roman chose to focus on developing smaller-scale OAO telescopes first in order to demonstrate the necessary technologies. She felt that even the modest 12 inch (30.5 cm) telescopes of OAO-2, which did not launch until 1968, were a major leap forward, not least because the development of suitable pointing control systems was a major technological hurdle. Astronomers promoted the idea of a telescope on the Moon, which Roman felt had too many insurmountable issues such as dust, and engineers at NASA's
Langley Research Center promoted the idea in 1965 of a space telescope with human operators, which Roman considered an absurd complication. After the success of OAO-2, Roman began to entertain beginning the Large Space Telescope, and started giving public lectures touting the scientific value of such a facility. NASA asked the
National Academy of Sciences in 1969 to study the science of a 3m-class telescope in space, resulting in an endorsement for NASA to proceed. In 1971 Roman set up the Science Steering Group for the Large Space Telescope, and appointed both NASA engineers and astronomers from all over the country to serve on it, for the express purpose of designing a free-floating space observatory that could meet the community's needs but would be feasible for NASA to implement. Roman was very involved with the early planning and specifically, the setting up of the program structure. According to Robert Zimmerman, "Roman had been the driving force for an LST from its earliest days" and that she, along with astronomer Charles Robert O'Dell, hired in 1972 to be the Project Scientist under Roman as the Program Scientist, "were the primary advocates and overseers of the LST within NASA, and their efforts working with the astronomical community produced a detailed paradigm for NASA operation of a large scientific project that now serves as a standard for large astronomical facilities." This included creating and devolving responsibility for mission science operations to the
Space Telescope Science Institute. With both the astronomical community and the NASA hierarchy convinced of the feasibility and value of the LST, Roman then spoke to politically connected men in a series of dinners hosted by NASA Administrator
James Webb in order to build support for the LST project, and then wrote testimony for Congress throughout the 1970s to continue to justify the telescope. She invested in detector technology, resulting in the Hubble being the first major observatory to use
charge-coupled device detectors, although these had been flown in space in 1976 in the
KH-11 Kennen reconnaissance satellites. Roman's final role in the development of Hubble was to serve on the selection board for its science operations. Because of her contribution, she often is called the "Mother of Hubble". Later in life she started being uncomfortable with that appellation given the many contributions made by others. NASA's then-Chief Astronomer,
Edward J. Weiler, who worked with Roman at the agency, called her 'the mother of the Hubble Space Telescope'. He said, "which is often forgotten by our younger generation of astronomers who make their careers by using Hubble Space Telescope". Weiler added, "Regretfully, history has forgotten a lot in today's Internet age, but it was Nancy in the old days before the Internet and before Google and e-mail and all that stuff, who really helped to sell the Hubble Space Telescope, organize the astronomers, who eventually convinced Congress to fund it." Williams recalls Roman as someone "whose vision in a NASA leadership position shaped U.S. space astronomy for decades".
Post-NASA After working for NASA for twenty-one years, she took an early retirement opportunity in 1979 in part to allow her to care for her elderly mother. She continued on as a consultant for another year in order to complete the selection of STScI. Roman was interested in learning computer programming, and so audited a course on FORTRAN at
Montgomery College that garnered her a job as a consultant for ORI, Inc. from 1980 to 1988. In that role, she was able to support research in geodesy and the development of astronomical catalogs, two of her former research areas. This led to her becoming the head of the Astronomical Data Center at NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center in 1995. She continued her work until 1997 for contractors who supported the
Goddard Space Flight Center. Roman then spent three years teaching advanced junior high and high school students and K-12 science teachers, including those in underserved districts. She then spent ten years recording astronomical textbooks for Reading for the Blind and Dyslexic. In a 2017 interview, Roman said: "I like to talk to children about the advantages of going into science and particularly to tell the girls, by showing them my life, that they can be scientists and succeed." From 1955 on, she lived in the
Washington, D.C. area, in the later years in
Chevy Chase, Maryland with her mother, who died in 1992. Outside her work, Roman enjoyed going to lectures and concerts and was active in the
American Association of University Women. She died on December 25, 2018, following a long illness.
Women in science Like most women in the sciences in the mid-twentieth century, Roman was faced with problems related to male domination in science and technology and the roles perceived as appropriate for women in that time period. She was discouraged from going into astronomy by people around her. In an interview with
Voice of America, Roman remembered asking her high school guidance counselor if she could take second year algebra instead of Latin. "She looked down her nose at me and sneered, 'What kind of lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?' That was the sort of reception I got most of the way", recalled Roman. At one time, she was one of very few
women in NASA, being the only woman with an executive position. She attended courses entitled, "Women in Management", in Michigan and at
Penn State to learn about issues regarding being a woman in a management position. Roman stated in an interview in 1980 that the courses were dissatisfying and addressed women's interests rather than women's problems. In 1963, when entry to the astronaut corps was restricted to men, Roman said in a speech that "I believe that there will be women astronauts some time, just as there are women airplane pilots". In her position she did not effect change to this, something she admitted to regretting. In recognition of her advancement of women in senior science management, Roman received recognitions from several women's organizations, including the Women's Education and Industrial Union, the ''Ladies' Home Journal'' magazine, Women in Aerospace, the Women's History Museum, and the American Association of University Women. She was also one of four women featured in 2017 in the "Women of NASA LEGO Set", which of all her honors she described as "by far the most fun." ==Selected publications==