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At Babies Hospital in New York, part of the assistant pathologist's job was to examine children who had died, to underst...
10/07/2026

At Babies Hospital in New York, part of the assistant pathologist's job was to examine children who had died, to understand what had taken them.
In 1935, one of those children came with a diagnosis already written down: celiac disease, a digestive disorder.
The pathologist looked closely at the pancreas, the organ that helps the body digest food. It was scarred and damaged in a way that did not fit celiac disease.

Her name was Dorothy Hansine Andersen.
She could have recorded the finding and moved on. Instead, she started digging.

She had learned early on to carry heavy loads by herself.
She was born in Asheville, North Carolina, on May 15, 1901. Her father was Danish. He died when she was 13.
She and her mother moved to St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Her mother was an invalid, and Dorothy became her sole provider until her mother died in 1920.

She supported herself through St. Johnsbury Academy and Mount Holyoke College, then entered Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She was one of only five women in her class.
She earned her medical degree in 1926.
She was 25.

What she wanted next was surgery. She completed a surgical internship at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York, and taught anatomy at the University of Rochester.
Then she applied for a surgical residency at the same hospital. It had never given one to a woman, and it refused her too.

She changed course.
She moved to Columbia University in New York and turned to pathology, the study of disease in the body's tissues. She researched endocrine glands and earned a doctorate in medical science in 1935.

That same year, she became assistant pathologist at Babies Hospital. Her days there were spent at the autopsy table and the microscope.

So when that child's pancreas did not match the diagnosis, she had the training to notice.
She went back through the hospital's autopsy records and the medical literature, looking for other children with the same damage.

She found them.
Many of those children had been labeled with celiac disease or with ordinary lung infections. Their pancreases showed scarring and small fluid-filled cysts. Their lungs showed damage too.

The pattern was a disease of its own.
In 1938, she published her findings on 49 patients and gave the illness a name: cystic fibrosis of the pancreas.

The part usually left out is what she did next. Andersen did not see herself only as a pathologist who studied the dead. She was determined to diagnose the disease in living children, early enough to help them. With her research team at Babies Hospital, she worked on that problem for years, and their discoveries led to a straightforward diagnostic test for cystic fibrosis that is still used today.

She also noticed that the disease ran in families, and she pursued that question as well.
Her curiosity did not stop with cystic fibrosis. She was the first to describe a rare inherited disorder of how the body stores sugar. It came to be known as Andersen's disease.
She also became fascinated by heart defects in infants and built a large collection of hearts from babies born with them.

In the mid-1940s, the surgeons developing open-heart surgery came to her. They needed her knowledge and her specimens.
At Babies Hospital, doctors preparing to operate on children's hearts were required to complete her training course first.
The woman denied a surgical residency was now teaching surgeons.

In 1952, Babies Hospital named her chief of pathology.
Outside the hospital, she lived on her own terms. She called herself a rugged individualist. She did her own roofing and carpentry and was happy to make her own home repairs.
The American Academy of Pediatrics made her an honorary fellow. The national cystic fibrosis research foundation named her its honorary chair.

She died on March 3, 1963. She was 61.
Those 49 patients in her 1938 paper became the starting point for decades of research, including the discovery of the gene behind cystic fibrosis.

If you have ever refused to let a wrong answer stand because something did not add up, you already know what kept Dorothy Andersen at her microscope.

In 2002, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Today her portrait hangs once more at the hospital where she made her discovery, now NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital.

On Tuesday nights in early 1950s America, Milton Berle ruled television. His comedy show on NBC drew enormous audiences,...
10/07/2026

On Tuesday nights in early 1950s America, Milton Berle ruled television. His comedy show on NBC drew enormous audiences, and few programs dared to schedule against it.
Then a small network put a bishop in the same time slot.
People in the industry called it an obituary spot. One agent wrote the newcomer off as a dead duck. That same evening, he would also be up against Frank Sinatra.

The newcomer was Fulton J. Sheen.
He was 56.

His program, Life Is Worth Living, went on the air in 1952 on the DuMont network, a smaller rival to NBC and CBS. At the time, Sheen was an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of New York, meaning he assisted the archbishop in running the church there. Each episode ran about 26 minutes.
The setup was plain: one man in his clerical dress, and a blackboard.

Sheen stood and talked. He spoke about moral questions and the ordinary troubles of daily life. When the blackboard filled with chalk, he called on a crew member out of sight of the camera to wipe it clean. He called these helpers his "angels."
The show was sponsored by Admiral, a company that made television sets.

It held its own against Berle. Within a year, Sheen had won an Emmy for Most Outstanding Television Personality.
The names he beat for it were Lucille Ball, Jimmy Durante, and the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow.

The man behind all this did not come from show business. He was born on May 8, 1895, in El Paso, Illinois, the son of a farmer named Newt Sheen and his wife, Delia. He grew up on a farm. At 8, he was serving as an altar boy, and the Bishop of Peoria, John Lancaster Spalding, took an interest in him.

He was ordained a priest on September 20, 1919. For three decades, from the 1920s into the early 1950s, he taught philosophy and religion at the Catholic University of America in Washington.
Here is the part usually left out. Sheen's ease in front of a camera was not beginner's luck. It grew out of years of speaking to a national audience he could not see.

From 1930 to 1950, he was a regular voice on The Catholic Hour, a weekly religious radio program heard across the United States. His talks ranged from devotion to the Virgin Mary to warnings about communism.

That is 20 years of talking to listeners in their kitchens and parlors, week after week.

He had also thought about television long before most families owned a set. On Easter Sunday, March 24, 1940, he took part in what Catholic University describes as the world's first broadcast of a Catholic religious service. It went out over W2XBS, an experimental station in New York. His talk that day carried a fitting title: "The Spiritual Symbolism of Television."

He was 44.

Twelve years later, when television had moved into living rooms across the country, Sheen was ready for it.
Accounts of his audience vary. Estimates of his weekly viewers run from about 10 million to as many as 30 million. By any measure, he was one of the most watched people on American television.
The program moved to ABC in 1955 and ran until 1957. Sheen kept appearing in other television programs into the late 1960s.

Professor. Radio voice. Bishop. Emmy winner.
In 1966, he became bishop of Rochester, New York, and he later held the title of archbishop.

The skills that made him a television star went back to those 20 years of radio. He spoke plainly, to people he would never meet, about the questions that weighed on them.
If you ever sat with your family around a small black-and-white set on a weeknight, you know how one familiar voice could become part of the household.

Fulton J. Sheen died on December 9, 1979, in his private chapel. He was 84.

His papers are kept today in the archives of the Catholic University of America, where he taught for so long.
His remains rest in a side chapel of the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Peoria, Illinois, moved there from St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York after a long court dispute.

Georges Bruhat wrote a physics course in four volumes: electricity, heat, light and mechanics.Generations of French stud...
10/07/2026

Georges Bruhat wrote a physics course in four volumes: electricity, heat, light and mechanics.
Generations of French students learned from those books. One of them was his daughter.
Yvonne Bruhat was born in Lille on 29 December 1923. Her father was a respected physicist, and her mother, Berthe, taught philosophy. When Yvonne was three, the family moved to Paris, where her father joined the university's Faculty of Science. Later he became deputy director of the École Normale Supérieure, one of France's most elite colleges.

He loved explaining science, and his daughter loved listening. Still, by her own account, he did not picture a scientific career for her. He imagined her as a good mother and perhaps a high school teacher. His hopes for a scientist rested more on her younger brother, François.

Yvonne had other ideas. In 1941, in occupied Paris, she won a silver medal in physics in France's national competition for top secondary pupils. In 1943 she began studying at the École Normale Supérieure for women at Sèvres.

The following summer, the war reached her family directly.
On the night of 4 August 1944, the Gestapo came to the École Normale Supérieure looking for a student and searched the building. They took Yvonne's mother as a hostage to force her husband to come forward. Georges Bruhat was arrested and deported to a camp in Germany.
He did not come home.
Yvonne was 20.

She later dedicated a book to him. She wrote that he had given her a love of physics through his kindness and explanations, and, after his death, through his books.

She kept studying. In 1946 she graduated and began research under the mathematician André Lichnerowicz. Another leading mathematician, Jean Leray, pointed her toward a question no one had yet answered about Albert Einstein's theory of gravity.

Einstein's equations describe how matter bends space and time. They were famous and powerful, but also fiendishly difficult. Nobody had proved a basic point: if you know exactly how the universe is arranged at one moment, do the equations determine one, and only one, future?
For Isaac Newton's laws, the answer had long been known. For Einstein's, it was an open question.

Yvonne answered it. Her doctoral thesis in 1951, followed by a major paper in 1952, gave the first rigorous proof that Einstein's equations do have such solutions, and that they are unique, at least for a stretch of time.

She was 28.
Here is the part usually left out. Her work did more than tidy up the mathematics. Einstein himself had wavered for years over whether gravitational waves, ripples in space and time, were physically real or a mathematical illusion. Her result showed that the full equations really did allow such waves to travel, and at a fixed speed. It gave the first solid mathematical evidence that they were real.

In 1951 she went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein worked. Leray introduced them. Her English was not good, despite years of lessons, so Einstein told her to explain her thesis in French, which he understood. He would reply in English. He found the work interesting, and she went back to talk with him often during her stay.

Her career grew from there. She taught at Marseille, joined the Faculty of Science in Paris in 1960, and married her second husband, the mathematician Gustave Choquet. From then on she published as Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat.

In 1979 she became the first woman elected a full member of the French Academy of Sciences. She was 55.
She did not slow down. In 2009, in her mid-eighties, she published a major book on general relativity and Einstein's equations, running to about 800 pages. In her nineties she was still lecturing and writing, including a memoir of life as a woman mathematician.

Then, in September 2015, detectors in the United States picked up gravitational waves for the first time, from two black holes colliding far out in space. Scientists confirmed the signal by comparing it with computer simulations of Einstein's equations. Those simulations rest on the mathematical footing she had laid decades earlier.

Sixty-three years passed between her proof and that detection.
She was alive to see it. She was 91.
France made her a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, one of the country's highest distinctions. In December 2023, colleagues gathered for a conference to mark her 100th birthday.

Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat died in Mérignac, near Bordeaux, on 11 February 2025, at the age of 101.

If you have ever kept a parent's books long after they were gone, you already understand where a part of her life's work began.
Her father's four-volume physics course still sits on library shelves in France. Beside it, in many collections, stands her own book on Einstein's equations, dedicated to him.

Every summer for several years, a Dutch professor of mathematics crossed to England for his holidays. He stayed in the v...
10/06/2026

Every summer for several years, a Dutch professor of mathematics crossed to England for his holidays. He stayed in the village of Hever, at the home of a cousin of the woman he had come to work with.
He had first seen her work in a set of photographs. They showed cardboard models, carefully made, of shapes that cannot be built in our world at all.

The professor was Pieter Hendrik Schoute, of the University of Groningen. The woman was Alicia Boole Stott, a wife and mother with no formal education, living on a very small income.

She had found her way into the fourth dimension on her own.
Her story began in Cork, Ireland, where she was born in 1860. Her father was George Boole, the mathematician whose system of logic would one day help make computers possible.

He died when she was four.
Her mother, Mary, moved to London with four of the five daughters to find work. Alicia was left behind in Cork, raised partly by her grandmother and partly by a great-uncle. These were unhappy years for her.

She was 11 when she rejoined her mother and sisters in London. Home was a cramped, dark lodging. There was no money for schooling in the usual sense.

What there was, instead, was her mother's teaching. Mary Boole believed children should discover ideas for themselves, by handling real shapes and working out what they meant.

Then a visitor brought the cubes.
Charles Howard Hinton, the son of the man Mary Boole worked for, arrived with a great many small wooden cubes. He gave the youngest girls a list of Latin names for them and asked them to stack them into shapes. Hinton was fascinated by the idea of a fourth dimension. At least one of her sisters found the game a bore.

Alicia, at about 18, did not.
To picture what she was attempting, think of a cube. A square is its flat, two-dimensional cousin. A four-dimensional shape is to a cube roughly what a cube is to a square. No one can build one, but it can be studied by its slices, the way a loaf is understood by cutting it.

Working with nothing but the ruler-and-compass methods of ancient Greek geometry, Alicia worked out that there are exactly six regular four-dimensional shapes. Then she drew the three-dimensional slices of each one, as it would pass through our space, and built cardboard models of those slices by hand.

She had never been taught the algebra that professional mathematicians used for such problems. She did it by seeing.
Here is a detail often left out. It is to Alicia Boole Stott that English owes the word "polytope," the name for these higher-dimensional shapes. A self-taught young woman in a London lodging gave a whole branch of geometry its everyday name in English.

Life moved on. She took secretarial work near Liverpool, and in 1890 she married Walter Stott, an actuary. They had two children, Mary and Leonard, and money was always tight.
It was through her husband that she learned, in 1895, that Schoute was studying the same slices of the same shapes. She sent him photographs of her models.

Schoute was astonished, and soon he was on his way to England.
Their partnership lasted almost 20 years. He persuaded her to publish, and her papers appeared in Amsterdam, some under her name alone and some written with him.

Even then, she described herself modestly. In a 1911 letter, she wrote that she had been busy "staining very shabby floors" and other household jobs, and that she was a duffer at the algebraic side of mathematics.

Schoute died in 1913. The following year, the University of Groningen awarded her an honorary doctorate, as part of its 300th anniversary. She was 54. For reasons that are not clear, she did not travel to receive it, and the degree was conferred in her absence.
Around 1930, she met the young geometer Donald Coxeter, who would become one of the century's great experts on these shapes. He called her Aunt Alice. They wrote to each other, visited for what they called tea and polytopes, and once gave a joint talk at Cambridge, where she brought her models and gave them to the department.

When Coxeter left for Canada in 1936, she sent him an antique stained-glass lampshade shaped like one of the classical solids.

She died in 1940.
Six shapes. A teenager with a box of cubes had found every one of them, and spent a lifetime showing what they looked like from inside our world.
If you have ever understood something deeply long before anyone thought to ask what you knew, you already know how she spent those years.

Her cardboard models are held today at the University Museum in Groningen, where her honorary degree was granted. Colored drawings of hers were found there in 2001.

The job of the two men in the U.S. Park Police helicopter sounded straightforward and was very hard to do. Hold the airc...
10/06/2026

The job of the two men in the U.S. Park Police helicopter sounded straightforward and was very hard to do. Hold the aircraft low over the ice-choked Potomac River. Lower a line to the people in the water. Pull them out one at a time.

The pilot was Donald Usher. The paramedic beside him was Melvin "Gene" Windsor.

On the afternoon of 13 January 1982, they did that job again and again.

Below them, a handful of survivors clung to wreckage in the freezing river. Minutes earlier, Air Florida Flight 90 had taken off from Washington National Airport in a heavy snowstorm. It failed to climb, struck the 14th Street Bridge, and plunged through the ice.

There were 79 people aboard.
Only five would come out of that river alive.

Among the people in the water was a man in his forties. When the line came within his reach, he caught it and passed it to someone else.

The helicopter carried that person to the riverbank, then came back.
He passed it on again.
When the crew finally returned for him, he was gone.

For a long time, no one knew who he had been. Newspapers and television called him the man in the water. Time magazine published an essay about him before anyone could put a name to it.

His name was Arland D. Williams Jr.
He was 46.

He had grown up in Mattoon, Illinois, where friends in high school called him Chub. He graduated from The Citadel, the military college in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1957. By 1982 he was a bank examiner for the Federal Reserve, based in Atlanta, and the father of a son and a daughter.

Then came the river.

Here is what most retellings leave out: identifying him took about 18 months. Five people had been pulled from the Potomac, and the passenger who kept giving away the line had vanished with the wreckage. Only after a Coast Guard investigation, completed in June 1983, could officials say with confidence that the man in the water was Arland Williams.

At the White House that same month, President Ronald Reagan presented the Coast Guard's Gold Lifesaving Medal to his family. His parents, his son, his daughter and his sister stood in the Oval Office to receive it. In his remarks, Reagan said Williams had been trapped in the wreckage by a jammed seat belt, and that he had repeatedly handed the line to others he believed were worse off than he was.

By that account, he was not weighing danger from a safe distance. He was held fast, injured and in freezing water when he made his choice.

Most of the people on Flight 90 never had a chance to make any choice at all. Of the 79 aboard, 74 died.
He was not the only one who risked the Potomac for a stranger that day. Lenny Skutnik, a government worker watching from the shore, jumped into the icy water to pull an exhausted survivor to safety. Usher and Windsor kept flying back over the river until there was no one left to reach.

But only one of the people in the water held the line and kept handing it away.

The country did not forget.
One of the spans of the 14th Street Bridge, the bridge the plane had struck, was renamed in his honor. It is now the Arland D. Williams Jr. Memorial Bridge.

In 2000, The Citadel created a society in his name to honor graduates who perform acts of extraordinary heroism. His classmates from 1957 established a professorship at the college devoted to the study of heroism. In 2003, an elementary school in Mattoon was named for him.

The five who came out of the river went on with their lives.
If you have ever let someone else go first when you needed help just as badly, you already understand a little of what he chose in that water.

His portrait hangs at The Citadel. And every day, traffic crosses the Potomac on a bridge that carries his name, close to where the man in the water gave away his place.

She could pray in Irish long before she could speak English.Kathleen Rita McNulty was born on 12 February 1921 in Feymor...
10/05/2026

She could pray in Irish long before she could speak English.
Kathleen Rita McNulty was born on 12 February 1921 in Feymore, near the village of Creeslough in County Donegal. Irish was the language of her home.

That same night, during Ireland's War of Independence, her father was arrested at the house. He was held in Derry Jail until January 1922, when he was released and the charges were dropped.
The family's future lay across the Atlantic. Her father went ahead in 1923 and built a house in Wyndmoor, on the edge of Philadelphia.

The rest of the family followed. They arrived in New York aboard the SS Columbia on 13 October 1924.

She was three.
English came at school. By 1930 the McNultys lived at 48 Highland Avenue in Chestnut Hill, with six children, two uncles and two lodgers under one roof.

She graduated from Hallahan High School, a Catholic girls' school, in 1938. Chestnut Hill College for Women offered her a scholarship.
Her reason for choosing mathematics was practical. She later explained that she needed good grades to keep the scholarship, and mathematics came easiest.

Then she found she loved it.
She did not want to teach, so she took business as her minor. She graduated in 1942, in the middle of the Second World War.
An advertisement asked for mathematics graduates. The University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering was hiring for war work.

She applied, and they took her on. She was 21.
Her official title was "computer."
In those years, that word meant a person. She and dozens of other young women calculated the paths of artillery shells, so that firing tables could tell gunners how to aim.

The tools were desk calculators driven by electric motors. Every result had to be written down by hand and keyed back in for the next step.

By her own account, one trajectory took 30 to 40 hours at a desk. Each gun needed a full table of them.
In the same school, two engineers, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, were building a machine meant to do this work electronically. It was called ENIAC.
Then the work changed shape.

Six women from the computing group were chosen to make the machine run. Kay McNulty was one of them, alongside Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman and Frances Bilas.

Here is what most people miss: there was no manual.
Programming ENIAC did not mean typing instructions. The women studied the machine's diagrams and set up each problem by hand, breaking equations into tiny steps and routing each one to the right unit in the right order.

The machine could carry out many operations at once. Every number had to arrive exactly when the next step needed it.
ENIAC was shown to the public on 15 February 1946.

The women who had learned to make it work were not presented as its programmers. According to historian Linde Lunney, they were cast as hostesses at the launch, and official reports left them out.
Kay later put her wartime job plainly. ENIAC, she said, had made her, one of the first "computers," obsolete.

On 7 February 1948, she married John Mauchly.
He was a widower with two young children and 14 years her senior. Her parents objected and did not attend the wedding.
Her mother came to visit only after the first grandchild was born.

Kay raised seven children: five of her own and two stepchildren. On the family farm in Ambler, Pennsylvania, she also kept working on programs for the computers her husband went on to design, BINAC and UNIVAC.

That work went largely uncredited.
John Mauchly died in 1980.
For years afterward, she spoke about ENIAC at meetings and celebrations. She later said she always spoke as John's widow, telling his story rather than her own.

In 1985 she married the photographer Severo Antonelli.
The change came at a talk at Princeton. She shared the stage with Kathe Jacoby and Jean Bartik, another of the original six.
She later described it as the first time she spoke for herself.
She and Jean Bartik went on to give many talks together, at universities and at companies including IBM and Microsoft.

Recognition followed. In 1997 she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, and Chestnut Hill College, which had once given her a scholarship, awarded her an honorary doctorate.

Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli died on 20 April 2006 in Wyndmoor, the same district where her father had built the family's first American home.

She was 85.
If you have ever done the careful work behind someone else's big moment, and watched the credit go elsewhere, you already know what Kay McNulty carried.

In Creeslough, a plaque carries her name, unveiled by her granddaughter in 2023. At Dublin City University, a computer science building carries it too.
Both stand in the country she left at three.

Some Nevada schoolchildren met each week to learn the constellations from books.The club had been one girl's idea.Her na...
10/05/2026

Some Nevada schoolchildren met each week to learn the constellations from books.
The club had been one girl's idea.
Her name was Nancy Grace Roman.
She was 11.

She had been born in Nashville, Tennessee, in May 1925. Her father was a geophysicist, and his work kept the family moving: Oklahoma, Texas, New Jersey, Michigan, Nevada. Her mother taught music. Roman later credited both parents with sparking her interest in science.

By high school, she knew she wanted to be an astronomer.
Not everyone around her agreed.

She later recalled asking her high school counsellor in Baltimore if she could take a second year of algebra instead of Latin. As she remembered it, the counsellor asked her: "What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?"

She took the mathematics.
She went through an accelerated programme at Western High School and graduated in three years.

At Swarthmore College, she worked at the college's Sproul Observatory and earned her degree in astronomy in 1946. Three years later, she completed her doctorate at the University of Chicago.

She stayed on at the university's Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, sometimes travelling to the McDonald Observatory in Texas to work with the astronomer W. W. Morgan.

Her research there was solid and original. She studied how the chemical makeup of stars related to the way they move through our galaxy. She also noticed, by luck, that the light of a star called AG Draconis had changed dramatically since earlier observations. She later said that discovery did a great deal to raise her profile.

But a research career at the university had a ceiling.
At that time, a woman had very little chance of winning a permanent, tenured research post there. In 1955, she left.
She moved to the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington and took up radio astronomy, rising to head its microwave spectroscopy section.

Then a single conversation changed the direction of her life.
At a lecture, she was approached by an official named Jack Clark. NASA was new. He asked if she knew anyone who might set up a programme for astronomy from space.

She took that as an invitation to apply.
In 1959, she became NASA's first Chief of Astronomy. She was the first woman to hold an executive post at the space agency.

She was in her early thirties.
Astronomy from space barely existed. There was no programme to inherit. She built one.

She travelled to university astronomy departments across the country to explain what NASA was planning. She asked astronomers what they wanted to observe, and she explained what a telescope above the atmosphere could see that no telescope on the ground ever could.

Over the years, she oversaw satellites that studied the Sun, ultraviolet light, X-rays and the shape of the Earth. She also planned research flown on rockets and on the Gemini, Apollo and Skylab missions.

And she began work on the biggest project of all.
A large telescope in orbit.

Here is what most people miss: Hubble needed far more than good engineering. It needed money, and it needed astronomers to agree on what it should be. Roman set up the committees that shaped it and helped organise the scientific community behind it. Ed Weiler, who later served as NASA's chief scientist for Hubble, credited her with helping to sell the telescope and with organising the astronomers whose case eventually persuaded Congress to fund it.
That is why she became known as the "Mother of Hubble."
She left NASA in 1979, after 21 years at the agency.

Hubble had not yet flown.
She went on working as a contractor supporting NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center until 1997.

On 24 April 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope finally launched. It went on to change what people everywhere knew about the universe.

Roman continued to speak to students and encourage young women to study science for the rest of her life.
She died on 25 December 2018.
She was 93.

Two decades at NASA, and much of that time spent on a telescope she would never operate herself.
In 2020, NASA announced that its next major space observatory would carry her name.
If you have ever spent years building something you knew someone else would get to use, you already know what Nancy Grace Roman carried.

The Hubble Space Telescope is still in orbit above the Earth. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on 30 August 2026, and right now it is travelling to its observing post, about a million miles from home.

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