She was told women couldn't be scientists. Now a NASA space telescope bears her name
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch on Sunday in Florida.
Growing up, Nancy Grace Roman was told that "women could not be scientists." She didn't listen.
Roman went on to earn a doctorate in astronomy at the University of Chicago in 1949, and by 1960, she was NASA’s Chief of Astronomy and Relativity, the agency’s first chief astronomer. Her work would eventually earn the nickname "Mother of Hubble" for making NASA's first major space-based telescope a reality.
Roman, who passed away in 2018, said it didn't come easy for her. A NASA biography of Roman explains that despite overseeing the agency's astronomy programs, Roman "could still not get past the secretaries without stopping to explain her credentials."
“If I hadn’t been stubborn, I would’ve been talked out of it years earlier,” Roman once told NASA, according to her biography on the agency’s website.
"Dr. Roman was a brilliant astronomer, and she realized how much power we would have if we could get telescopes up above Earth's atmosphere, which otherwise gets in the way of our observations from the ground, and how it could complement the astronomy we can do from the ground," said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, the director of NASA's Astrophysics Division, during a prelaunch news conference.
One of her greatest accomplishments was leading the effort to secure funding and approvals for the construction and launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. She became the project's champion and fought to use a new kind of imaging sensor that would eventually become the standard despite concerns about its adoption at the time.
"She had the technical acumen to detail those arguments, and the leadership and political capability to explain that to her peers and to stakeholders, and although she's often most associated with those first space telescopes, it's really our full fleet that she deserves credit for," Domagal-Goldman added.
That fleet now includes a new 300-megapixel infrared space observatory that bears her name. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch on Sunday, August 30 at 7:26 a.m. ET, nine months ahead of schedule, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The telescope has about the same sensitivity and sharpness as Hubble but a field of view at least 100 times larger, meaning it can survey the sky much faster.
"This survey will contain over 2 billion galaxies and will enable us to study how the structures in our universe—stars, the galaxies, the clusters of galaxies—grew and evolved. We'll also measure how our universe has expanded over time, and these are the keys that will allow us to unlock the fundamental nature of dark matter and dark energy and the fabric of the universe itself," explained Julie McEnery, NASA's Roman telescope senior project scientist, at the prelaunch news conference.
Dark matter is still very much a mystery to scientists. It doesn't emit, absorb or reflect light, but is believed to make up four-fifths of the universe's matter. Astronomers only know it exists because of its gravity and its impact on galaxies.
"It behaves somewhat like an ocean current, invisibly steering everything within it," according to NASA. "Stars toward the edge of the galaxy move too fast to be held in by the galaxy’s luminous matter. It’s as though someone cut all the ropes in a carnival swing ride, yet the swings continued spinning like normal," explains the agency.
Because of its large field of view, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help researchers better understand dark matter by capturing how the phenomenon's gravity bends light and distorts a galaxy's shape. NASA says its current cosmological model can't explain why the universe's behavior is different now than it was when it was young.
"We're probably not going to confirm a standard model of how the universe works. We're very likely to demonstrate that our standard model is wrong, and to set ourselves on a path to figuring out how does our universe really work," said McEnery.
The space observatory will also study dark energy, a little-understood cosmic force that pushes galaxies apart, causing the universe to accelerate.
"After the big bang sent the universe’s contents hurtling apart, scientists thought the expansion would gradually slow down. But instead galaxies are racing away at an ever-increasing clip, swept apart by an unseen power dubbed dark energy,” explains NASA.
NASA will also use the telescope to hunt for around 100,000 exoplanets, planets located outside our solar system, some of which could potentially support life.
“It's going to discover thousands of worlds beyond the solar system, and including something called rogue planets. These are planets that don't orbit any star. And it will uncover planets orbiting in the habitable zones of their stars. Ones that could potentially host life as we know it," said Asa Stahl, science editor at The Planetary Society.
One of the challenges of locating exoplanets is that the light from their neighboring star makes it difficult for a telescope to spot them. Roman has a solution for that as well.
"Roman's going to carry an instrument called a coronagraph that will block the light from a particular star that it’s aiming at to make the worlds around it more visible, and that is at least 100 times more powerful than any existing facility, and will help test out that technology for a future NASA flagship called the Habitable Worlds Observatory," Stahl said.
NASA officials say Roman will collect an astronomical amount of data during its mission, sending more than one terabyte of information back to Earth each day. And the agency says all the data will be made available to the public as soon as it's processed.
"This is kind of like streaming a million songs from a million miles from Earth down to Earth. That's more music than I'll probably listen to in my whole life," said Jeremy Perkins, a Roman telescope integration and test scientist at NASA.
The telescope will orbit in a region called Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, about 1 million miles away from the Earth. In this location, the telescope will rarely be blocked by Earth and infrared heat from the Earth, sun and moon is minimized. NASA says it will take several months for the telescope to arrive at that location and get it up and running.
The development, launch and operation of the 18,000-pound, 42-foot-long telescope cost about $4.3 billion, and the mission is expected to last five years, according to NASA. And while it currently can't service observatories at the L2 location, Roman is designed to be refueled should that eventually become feasible. Historically, most of NASA's missions have exceeded their initial duration.
"What makes me most excited about Roman is the discovery potential. With two billion galaxies, we'll have 2,000 objects that are one in a million. We'll be exploring patches of sky as a function of time with exquisite sensitivity. We'll find new things that go bump in the night. I very much hope, and in fact expect, that the most exciting things from Roman will be a surprise-something that we couldn't predict," said McEnery.
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