Nancy Grace Roman

Hello! My name is Nancy Grace Roman. I was born a long, long time ago, in the year 1925. When I was a little girl, my favorite thing to do was look up at the night sky. My mom would take me outside and show me the beautiful, twinkling lights. We would find the moon and look for the star pictures called constellations. I thought the stars and planets were the most wonderful things in the whole wide world.

I loved the stars so much that when I grew up, I became an astronomer. An astronomer is a scientist who studies space! I got a very important job at a place called NASA. At NASA, we planned big adventures to explore space. I had a big idea. I wanted to build a giant telescope and put it high above the clouds, out in space. A telescope in space could see the stars much better than any telescope on the ground.

It took a lot of hard work, but we did it! The space telescope we built is called the Hubble Space Telescope. It went into space in 1990. Because I helped make it happen, people started calling me the “Mother of Hubble.” I was so proud. The Hubble telescope takes amazing pictures of colorful galaxies and sparkling stars that are very, very far away. I lived to be 93 years old. Even today, the Hubble telescope is still up in space, helping us all see how beautiful our universe is.