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Nancy Grace Roman: The Mother of Hubble

Nancy grace roman
Nancy Grace Roman at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD in the early 1970s. She became NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy in 1960.
Credit: NASA

Nancy Grace Roman (1925-2018), NASA's first chief astronomer, is known as the 'Mother of Hubble.' In a time when women were discouraged from studying math and science, Roman became a research astronomer and was instrumental in taking NASA's Hubble Space Telescope from an idea to reality and establishing NASA’s program of space-based astronomical observatories.

In this image from the early 1970s, Dr. Roman is shown at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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Last Updated
Jun 12, 2023
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