Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA renames planet-finding telescope after woman trailblazer

Allison Matyus
By

NASA has renamed the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope mission after one of the agency’s trailblazing women. 

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — which will search for planets outside our solar system — is named after the first chief of astronomy in NASA’s Office of Space Science, She was also the first woman to hold an executive position at NASA.

Recommended Videos

Roman worked at NASA for 21 years and helped to plan the Hubble telescope, including establishing the Hubble program’s structure. She is known as “the mother of Hubble” because of her advocacy and extensive work with the telescope. 

“She believed she could be an astronomer during a time when there were so many barriers for women in science,” said Elisa Quintana, an astrophysicist at NASA, during a NASA livestream announcing the telescope’s new name. “She believed in investing in missions that would be useful for future generations.”

Roman began working at NASA in 1959. She died in 2018.

Artist’s illustration of the WFIRST spacecraft.
Artist’s illustration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch in the mid-2020s to help astronomers try to understand dark energy, which makes up about two-thirds of the entire universe but is a mystery to astronomers. 

The telescope will also search for exoplanets by measuring light from a billion galaxies throughout the mission’s lifetime. It has the technology to capture a sky area over 100 times larger than the Hubble telescope, which will allow it to discover more exoplanets than we ever have before.

This tool could be used to identify not only small, distant planets, but also other cosmic bodies like brown dwarfs and black holes.

The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope joins other space telescopes and instruments named after women, including the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, the Annie Maunder Astrographic Telescope, and the Scope telescope named after Henrietta Scope. NASA’s GRAIL lunar impact site is named after Sally Ride, America’s first woman in space. 

NASA plans to send the first woman to the moon by 2024 as part of its Artemis mission. 

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Allison Matyus
Allison Matyus
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Allison Matyus is a general news reporter at Digital Trends. She covers any and all tech news, including issues around social…
NASA confirms ISS will host cosmonauts through 2028
The International Space Station’s solar arrays provide power for the orbiting laboratory. NASA will install a total of six new roll out solar arrays in front of the existing arrays at 1A, 2B, 3A, 3B, 4A, and 4B to augment the power. During the Aug. 24 spacewalk, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and astronaut Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will install the modification kit on the 4A power channel, where the next new roll out solar array will be installed in 2022.

The International Space Station (ISS) looked for a while like it was about to become a little less international when the Russian space agency chief suggested last year that his country would stop sending cosmonauts to the orbital outpost “after 2024.”

Roscosmos chief Yuri Borisov made the statement in July during a period of increasing tension between the U.S. and Russia following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine five months earlier.

Read more
NASA’s InSight lander looks into Mars to study the planet’s core
This artist’s concept shows a cutaway of Mars, along with the paths of seismic waves from two separate quakes in 2021. Detected by NASA’s InSight mission, these seismic waves were the first ever identified to enter another planet’s core.

NASA's Mars InSight lander may have come to the end of its mission last year, but data from the lander is still being used to contribute to science. Data that the lander collected on marsquakes, seismic events that are similar to earthquakes, has been used to get the best look yet at Mars's core.

The lander was armed with a highly sensitive seismometer instrument that could detect seismic waves as they moved through the martian interior. By looking at the way in which these waves bounced off boundaries and moved at different speeds through different materials, scientists can work out what the inside of a planet is composed of. The latest findings show that the martian core is around 2,220 miles across, which is smaller than previously thought. The core is also denser than previously believed The results also showed that around one-fifth of the core, which is made up of liquid iron alloy, is composed of sulfur, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen.

Read more
An old NASA spacecraft will crash to Earth on Wednesday
NASA's RHESSI spacecraft.

A retired NASA spacecraft will reenter Earth’s atmosphere on Wednesday, with some parts of the vehicle expected to crash to the planet's surface.

While most of the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) spacecraft is expected to burn up as it enters the atmosphere at high speed, some parts of the 660-pound (300-kilogram) machine are likely to survive the descent.

Read more