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- Hey, I'm Thomas Zurbuchen, also known as Dr. Z.
- And I'm Ellen Stofan, also known as Dr. E,
and welcome to another episode of E.Z. Science.
- And I'm so glad to be here with you
right next to the headquarters building at NASA,
which just in time, for Women's History Month,
has a new name, Mary W. Jackson Headquarters.
And I'm just so excited to have that name on it.
What do you know about Mary Jackson?
- Well, I learned about Mary Jackson
from reading the book, Hidden Figures,
and then of course seeing the movie.
And she's just this amazing woman
who wanted to become an engineer at NASA.
She wanted to take the classes,
they wouldn't let her in the school,
it was for whites only.
She fought to get a place in the class,
got her certification,
and became the first black woman engineer at NASA.
And just the perseverance she had to show,
she knew she belonged.
She knew that they needed her help
to help get the first humans into space.
And she persevered, amazing.
- Today we want to talk about women in astronomy,
and who are the names that come to mind,
when you think about women in astronomy,
kind of in a context of Women's History Month?
- You know, what I love
is that the history of women in astronomy
goes back very very far.
Women have always been there.
They've always been making contributions.
Many people have heard
of the famous astronomer William Herschel,
but his sister, Caroline,
actually used his telescopes
and discovered a number of comets.
There's a woman I particularly admire
named Phoebe Waterman Haas.
She was one of the first women
to operate the Lick Telescope.
Women like Henrietta Leavitt,
who worked up at the Harvard Observatory,
and invented a way that we actually learned
how to measure the distance to other galaxies.
So women were there, making fundamental discoveries,
helping the science move along,
but we don't know their stories as well as we should.
- One of my favorite women
who have really made history in astronomy
is Dr. Nancy Grace Roman.
- What amazed me about her is she had this opportunity
to create an entire NASA science program,
saying if you were going to lay out
this astrophysics program,
it's got to have a strong research component,
people doing the basic understanding
of how do stars form, how to galaxies evolve,
how do we develop instrumentation
and keep making better and better instruments
to measure stars and galaxies.
And then she also, of course, that critical piece for NASA
helped really push the development
of satellite after satellite after satellite.
- And in fact, there's a number of people who have told me
that it's hard to imagine Hubble being in space
if it wasn't for Nancy Grace Roman.
And many people therefore refer to her
as the mother of Hubble.
And so I'm so excited, because right after that,
we're going to launch later this year
the next big telescope has now her name on it,
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
- So it's really going to be able to give us
a comprehensive high resolution picture, if you will,
of the universe, in the infrared,
really helping us understand the structure
and origin of galaxies, really getting at a lot
of the forces in the history of the universe,
as we try to understand
what is the structure of the universe?
What does it tell us?
How can we learn the origins of the universe?
How it evolves over time?
What I really love is this idea
that when we had the Hubble Space Telescope,
which Nancy Grace Roman pioneered,
it caused us to rewrite astronomy textbooks.
The James Webb Space Telescope
is going to take us to the next level,
but then the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope will again,
really fundamentally change and expand our understanding
of the universe.
- And I know from just the last years of her life,
she was excited about dark energy, which of course,
relates to the largest scale structure of the universe
that requires the type of measurements
and large field of view,
a hundred times the field of view of Hubble,
that this telescope was enabled.
So it couldn't be more excited to have her name
on this next generation telescope,
and have her legacy celebrated in the heavens
with all the thousands of scientists
who are waiting for those data.
- Thanks to NASA
for naming this building after Mary W. Jackson.
And of course, thanks to all these women
that we're celebrating, these scientists and engineers
who helped us move the sciences forward.
And thank you for joining us for another episode
of E.Z. Science.
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