As like most people, I go to wikipedia to learn more about things I am ignorant of. Never heard of Nancy Grace Roman, so I was interested to learn more about her exciting life. Her wikipedia entry is a good read, so I popped over the the Hubble Telescope entry. There is no mention of her on the page.
One of her papers is listed as a source in the entry, but isn't available online. For someone known as the Mother of Hubble the lack of mention on the Hubble Telescope page is confusing.
Her page says quite a lot about her role in the program, and it's all backed by citations. The article mentions the difficulty of documenting a program that runs over decades.
"The last program in which set up the committee and with which she was highly involved was the Hubble Telescope. Roman was very involved with the early planning and specifically the setting up of the program's structure. Because of her contribution, she is often called the “Mother of Hubble."[13] NASA’s current chief astronomer, who worked with Roman at the agency, calls her “the mother of the Hubble Space Telescope.” “Which is often forgotten by our younger generation of astronomers who make their careers by using Hubble Space Telescope," says Ed Weiler. "Regretfully, history has forgotten a lot in today’s Internet age, but it was Nancy in the old days before the Internet and before Google and e-mail and all that stuff, who really helped to sell the Hubble Space Telescope, organize the astronomers, who eventually convinced Congress to fund it.” [8]"
NASA is a government entity. Government employees -- civil servants who aren't elected officials -- tend to keep a low public profile.
"Loose lips sink ships." When you have access to government secrets, it's not in the government's best interest, nor in your best interest, to loudly advertise your role. Among other things, doing things not in the government's best interest is an excellent way to end up fired.
For such jobs, you want the government and your colleagues to respect you, take you seriously and promote you, etc. If you want fame and public recognition, being a civil servant isn't the best career choice. If you want to accomplish things and mostly be left alone by the prying eyes of the world, it can be an excellent career choice.
My sister is a high ranking civil servant at a major federal organization. Most of her career has involved working for the government. She's testified before Congress on, I think, at least two occasions that I know of. Most people have no idea who she is. She seems to have little to no internet presence.
When I worked at Aflac, high ranking people, like department heads, also seemed to keep a pretty low profile. The world knew who the CEO was, but the three highest ranked people in my department appeared to have a LinkedIn account and I recall being unable to readily find any further public records online in their names -- other than a Twitter account where the department head posted mostly lightweight comments about his favorite sports team while not calling attention to the power he wielded at this Fortune 500 company.
I have at times tried to search for info from "big names" I know of via Hacker News. In some cases, I can find little or nothing about them online.
The cult of personality that gets so much attention is not actually as important as it appears to be. Private trust from influential people matters vastly more for opening doors and getting things done.
In general, there's a huge gap between who is influential in the day-to-day working of industry (even the tech industry) and public profiles. I can pretty much guarantee you that many senior executives of F500 corporations don't have Wikipedia articles. I could even point to founders of major US companies and people who figured prominently in popular books, especially from the pre-Web era, who don't have articles or who have pretty much a stub. Yet there are any number of articles about pop culture ephemera or someone who caught the attention of tech industry fandom at some point.
TBF, there is very little mention of individual names at all in the Hubble Wikipedia article (nor on NASA's Hubble site other than a few astronomy and rocketry pioneers). I suspect that with most large team projects, it's probably a doomed effort to fairly allocate credit.
Agreed. Is this an example of the patriarchal bias of science leaving women out of the telling of history -- finally being set straight by our friends at NPR -- or leftist revisionism trying to ascribe extremely inordinate influence to one member of a large team just because she happened to be female?
If one is assigning parentage, would Lyman Spitzer be the "father" of the Hubble telescope? Perhaps it had many "fathers" but only one "mother"?
EDIT: MichaelMoser123's added info and quotes are helpful. Merits updating the Wikipedia page to give her greater(/any) credit.
It's been a year of grieving for astrophysics pioneers. First, Stephen Hawking this summer, then Riccardo Giacconi [0] just weeks ago, and now Nancy Roman. (Giacconi directed the Hubble's "earth base" Space Telescope Science Institute for 12 years.)
It's hard to overstate the importance of the Hubble. It empowered physicists to prove that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating in its expansion (commemorated in the 2011 Nobel Prize). Its beautiful images also captured the popular imagination of people, inspiring myself and others to pursue scientific careers.
To those wondering why she deserves credit, from the NYTimes writeup [1]:
'''
It was Nancy in the old days before the internet and before Google and email and all that stuff who really helped to sell the Hubble Space Telescope, organize the astronomers, who eventually convinced Congress to fund it, “ Edward J. Weiler, Dr. Roman’s successor as chief scientist for the Hubble, told the Voice of America in 2011.
[...]
In addition to coordinating the efforts of astronomers and engineers in their development of the Hubble, Dr. Roman wrote testimony for NASA representatives making the case for the Hubble before Congress and she pitched the project to the Bureau of the Budget.
[...]
Dr. Roman also took part in development of the Cosmic Background Explorer, a satellite launched in 1989 that confirmed the Big Bang theory of the universe’s creation.
[...]
She later joined the United States Naval Research Laboratory, specializing in radio astronomy, and was recruited by NASA in 1959, a year after it was founded.
[...]
"The idea of coming in with an absolute clean slate to set up a program that I thought was likely to influence astronomy for 50 years was just a challenge that I couldn’t turn down,” she recalled in her National Air and Space Museum interview.
[...]
Dr. Roman retired from NASA in 1979 but continued as a consultant as work progressed toward the Hubble’s launching.
> It's hard to overstate the importance of the Hubble. It empowered physicists to prove that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating in its expansion (commemorated in the 2011 Nobel Prize). Its beautiful images also captured the popular imagination of people, inspiring myself and others to pursue scientific careers.
It's doubly important to realize that for the first few years, Hubble was deemed a failure. It was mocked in the newspapers and by late night comedians - but it was fixed, the program was recovered, and now it's hard to think of a world without it. (Even though that world will be here soon.)
One of her papers is listed as a source in the entry, but isn't available online. For someone known as the Mother of Hubble the lack of mention on the Hubble Telescope page is confusing.