Cover image: Nancy Roman at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Roman Collection. 

On 30 August a Falcon Heavy rocket will take off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with NASA’s newest space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman. And, as Dr Karina Cooper explains, the choice of name was particularly appropriate. “Dr Nancy Grace Roman overcame the barriers facing women in early 20th-century American astronomy to become the first chief of astronomy at NASA and the ‘Mother of the Hubble Space Telescope’.”

Her story is brought to life with personal photos, oral histories and original documents from her archived papers, which are now looked after by the Niels Bohr Library & Archives of the American Institute of Physics. Dr Cooper, whose background is in library and information science and astronomy, is a librarian there, working to make the various history of science collections accessible and to highlight the stories of the people in them.