Nasa has named its latest flagship space telescope after the American scientist Nancy Grace Roman. Roman’s contributions to astrophysics should have made her famous, yet many people will never have heard of her.

For decades, astronomers have been spoiled with stunning data and imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched into Earth orbit in 1990. In 2021, the James Webb space telescope (JWST) was sent into space as Hubble’s successor. Since then, JWST has identified some of the earliest stars and galaxies to form after the Big Bang and has made a host of other amazing discoveries.

JWST is designed to look at individual objects in extraordinary detail, but the Roman telescope is designed to survey the sky at scale. By monitoring vast areas of the cosmos, astronomers can piece together a broader picture of how the universe changes. The capabilities of the two telescopes are therefore complementary.

The new observatory’s name honours a scientist who battled discrimination in a male-dominated field, eventually becoming Nasa’s first chief astronomer.

Roman was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to a music teacher mother and a father who was a mathematician and physicist. She earned a bachelor’s degree in astronomy from Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, in 1946.

She gained her PhD at the University of Chicago, completing her graduate studies at the university’s Yerkes Observatory, where she worked........

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