Lettuce rowbotham biography of nancy grace

Elizabeth Rowbotham - daughter of James Rowbotham & Martha Register: Baptisms - , Page 44, Entry Source: LDS Film Baptism: 27 Feb

After three decades in orbit and thousands of discoveries, it is hard to believe that the Hubble Space Telescope was ever a contentious idea. However, in the midth century, a budget-starved NASA and a post-World War II government were hesitant to follow the ambitious ideal of a giant new telescope. As a woman in science, Nancy Grace Roman was met with skepticism or rejection at nearly every turn.

Her mother took her on nature walks to see birds and trees, but the constellations were what enraptured her most. By 6th grade, Roman had organized her friends into an astronomy club, and by 7th grade she knew that she wanted to devote her life to studying the cosmos. While she loved teaching at the university and researching stars at the university-operated Yerkes Observatory, she noted that there were no women at her institution with tenure in astronomy, despite their many years of experience.

In fact, at that time, there was only one tenured female astronomer in the country. Believing that her career aspirations would be stifled in academia, Roman left to take a position in radio astronomy at the Naval Research Laboratory.

Authored novels, autobiography, and biography, worked as a journalist reporting for Empire News and Sunday Dispatch, and contributed fiction and features to.

In , an employee at the fledgling NASA asked Roman if she knew someone who might be interested in creating a space-based astronomy program. Despite her years of experience and international reputation as a scientist, her previous work had been so underpaid that it was not recognized as employment and she was hired as a new PhD graduate.

She liked interacting with scientists in the international community and felt that she could make a big impact by determining which projects moved forward. Over the next two decades, Roman devoted herself to the cause of securing congressional approval and funding for what would become the Hubble Space Telescope. Roman led science and planning committees, brought together scientists and engineers, briefed executive branch officials, and lobbied NASA officials to approve a project as financially and scientifically ambitious as the Large Space Telescope, as it was then called.

From the location where it would be built to the size of its instruments, Roman was involved in every crucial decision about the telescope. A born leader, she was known for her unwavering commitment to the mission, regardless of who or what stood in her way. While they seemed to be a risk at the time, CCDs would go on to become the new gold standard for astronomical imaging.