Nancy Grace Roman (May 16, 1925 – December 25, 2018) was an American astronomer who made important contributions to stellar classification and motions.

[4] Shortly after, her father took a job as a geophysicist for an oil company and the family moved to Oklahoma three months after Roman's birth.

Roman and her parents later moved to Texas, New Jersey, Michigan, and then Nevada in 1936, when her father joined the Civil Service in geophysical research.

[4] When Roman was 11 years old, she formed an astronomy club, gathering with classmates once a week and learning about constellations from books.

She graduated in February 1946, and van de Kamp suggested that she continue studies at the University of Chicago, which was rebuilding its astronomy department after World War II.

[4] Finding the classes easier than at Swarthmore, she approached three professors, Otto Struve, George van Biesbroeck, and William Wilson Morgan, asking each for an observational astronomy project to work on.

[4] She traveled to Argonne National Laboratory to use their new astrometry device for measuring photographic plates, but was unable to convince Yerkes to acquire one.

Roman conducted a survey of all naked-eye stars similar to the Sun and realized that they could be divided into two categories by chemical content and motion through the galaxy.

[15] She later credited the publication of her discovery as a stroke of luck – the star is in that state only 2-3% of the time—that substantially raised her profile within the astronomical community, advancing to her career.

[19] After leaving the University of Chicago, Roman went to the Naval Research Laboratory and entered the radio astronomy program in 1954.

She pioneered the use of radio astronomy in geodetic work, including radar ranging to improve our calculation of the distance to the Moon at a wavelength of 10 cm (2.86 GHz).

[25] While at the NRL, Roman received an invitation to speak on her work with stars in Armenia, then in the Soviet Union, in 1956 for the dedication of the Byurakan Observatory.

The visit raised her visibility in the United States, with invitations to speak about the trip leading to a series of astronomy lectures.

Her reputation was well established, including with people at the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

[20] Part of her job was traveling throughout the country and giving lectures at astronomy departments, where she discussed the fact that the program was in development.

She established the policy that major astronomy projects would be managed by NASA for the good of the broader scientific community, rather than as individual experiments run by academic research scientists.

NASA will act as a coordinating agency to enable astronomers to obtain the basic observations they need from outer space.

From 1959 through the 1970s, when the introduction of peer review brought in outside expertise, she was the sole individual accepting or rejecting proposals for NASA astronomy projects based on their merit and her own knowledge.

She also believed as early as 1980 that the future Hubble would be able to detect Jupiter exoplanets by astrometry; this was successful in 2002 when astronomers characterized a previously discovered planet around the star Gliese 876.

[9] She also led, from 1959, the orbiting astronomical observatories (OAO) program, working with engineer Dixon Ashworth, initially a series of optical and ultraviolet telescopes.

[31] Roman was known to be blunt in her dealings, or as Robert Zimmerman put it, "her hard-nosed and realistic manner of approving or denying research projects had made her disliked by many in the astronomical community".

Other long wavelength missions started during her tenure were the Cosmic Background Explorer, which, although she was initially unconvinced would be able to pass review[34] garnered the Nobel Prize in 2006 for two of its leading scientists, and the Infrared Astronomy Satellite, both of which were overseen by Nancy Boggess, who Roman had hired in 1968 to help manage the growing portfolio of astronomy missions.

Roman was instrumental in NASA's acceptance of partnership in the International Ultraviolet Explorer, which she felt was her greatest success, saying, "IUE was an uphill fight.

[1] After the success of OAO-2, Roman began to entertain beginning the Large Space Telescope, and started giving public lectures touting the scientific value of such a facility.

With both the astronomical community and the NASA hierarchy convinced of the feasibility and value of the LST, Roman then spoke to politically connected men in a series of dinners hosted by NASA Administrator James Webb in order to build support for the LST project, and then wrote testimony for Congress throughout the 1970s to continue to justify the telescope.

[37] NASA's then-Chief Astronomer, Edward J. Weiler, who worked with Roman at the agency, called her 'the mother of the Hubble Space Telescope'.

[36] After working for NASA for twenty-one years, she took an early retirement opportunity in 1979 in part to allow her to care for her elderly mother.

Roman was interested in learning computer programming, and so audited a course on FORTRAN at Montgomery College that garnered her a job as a consultant for ORI, Inc. from 1980 to 1988.

[16] In an interview with Voice of America, Roman remembered asking her high school guidance counselor if she could take second year algebra instead of Latin.