Read the entire article here in The Washington Post.
NASA is naming its newest space telescope for pioneering astronomer Nancy Grace Roman — marking the first time in the agency’s 62-year history that one of its major, billion-dollar programs has been named for a woman.
Roman, who overcame obstacles that women faced in her male-dominated field and at NASA to become the agency’s first female executive and its first chief astronomer, is a “fitting” eponym for the project, astronomer Heidi Hammel said Wednesday. Her championing of space-based observatories gave her the nickname “Mother of Hubble.”
With the new telescope, NASA is “taking her child and making it even more powerful,” Hammel said. “It’s widening the Hubble vision.”
Until Wednesday morning, the Roman Space Telescope had been named WFIRST, for Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. Still under development at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., the telescope — identical in scale to the Hubble Space Telescope — will study dark matter, dark energy, distant planets and the evolution of the universe. Its launch target is the mid-2020s.