{"id":86202,"date":"2018-12-28T16:42:26","date_gmt":"2018-12-29T00:42:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/remembering-nancy-grace-roman-mother-of-hubble"},"modified":"2018-12-28T16:42:26","modified_gmt":"2018-12-29T00:42:26","slug":"remembering-nancy-grace-roman-mother-of-hubble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/remembering-nancy-grace-roman-mother-of-hubble","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Nancy Grace Roman, \u201cMother of Hubble\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1961, Nancy Grace Roman was already the first Chief of Astronomy in NASA\u2019s Office of Space Science. She developed that program in a time before the second wave of the Women\u2019s Movement in the United States began, when banks often refused women credit in their own names and there was still an active medical debate about whether women could ever physically endure spaceflight someday. But Roman opened the skies to humanity in new ways without ever leaving the ground.<\/p>\n

She earned her Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Chicago in 1949 and worked at the Yerkes Observatory there for six years afterward. She joined the radio astronomy group at the Naval Research Laboratory, becoming the head of the microwave spectroscopy section. As she recalled in 1980 in an oral history interview<\/a> with National Air and Space Museum curator David DeVorkin<\/a>, when she heard that NASA might set up a space astronomy program, she wanted to lead it: \u201cThe idea of coming in with an absolutely clean slate to set up a program that I thought was likely to influence astronomy for 50 years was just a challenge that I couldn\u2019t turn down. That\u2019s all there is to it.\u201d She joined NASA in 1959, just after the agency\u2019s founding.<\/p>\n

Roman opened the skies to humanity in new ways without ever leaving the ground.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1961, Nancy Grace Roman was already the first Chief of Astronomy in NASA\u2019s Office of Space Science. She developed that program in a time before the second wave of the Women\u2019s Movement in the United States began, when banks often refused women credit in their own names and there was still an active medical [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,45,1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-finance","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}