Above: Nancy Roman with one of the Orbiting Solar Observatories she designed while at NASA. Below: Roman continues her interest in education, volunteering with the organization Retired Scientists, Engineers & Technicians. Here she works with a student on a science project.

   Roman’s most important contribution to orbiting telescopes may have been her participation in the design of the Hubble space telescope. Her tireless efforts lobbying NASA and Congress eventually obtained funds to build the world’s first orbiting optical telescope.

   Using the Hubble Space Telescope, optical astronomy advanced farther in fifteen years than it had in the previous fifty years before the Hubble. The stunning images sent to Earth by the Hubble have increased public interest in astronomy as well as understanding of our universe. Images provided by HST are available to any person at the NASA web site.

   Now retired from NASA, Roman serves as a consulting astronomer to NASA and a senior scientist for the Astronomical Data Center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The ADC collects astronomical data from researchers worldwide, converts it into digital catalogs, and makes the information available to astronomers all over the world.

   After twenty-one years of designing and launching orbiting telescopes that gathered data unobtainable on Earth, Nancy Roman now continues the tradition of Harvard women whose enormous amounts of data supported astronomy for the first half of the last century. Instead of pens and paper, Roman uses a computer. Instead of depending on steamships or telegraph to distribute data, Roman sends and receives data over the Internet. Still, like the women at Harvard, she provides much of the glue that holds astronomical research together.