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(gentle music)

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- Hey, I'm Thomas Zurbuchen,
also known as Dr. Z.

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- And I'm Ellen Stofan,
also known as Dr. E,

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and welcome to another
episode of E.Z. Science.

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- And I'm so glad to be here with you

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right next to the
headquarters building at NASA,

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which just in time, for
Women's History Month,

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has a new name, Mary W.
Jackson Headquarters.

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And I'm just so excited
to have that name on it.

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What do you know about Mary Jackson?

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- Well, I learned about Mary Jackson

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from reading the book, Hidden Figures,

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and then of course seeing the movie.

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And she's just this amazing woman

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who wanted to become an engineer at NASA.

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She wanted to take the classes,

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they wouldn't let her in the school,

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it was for whites only.

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She fought to get a place in the class,

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got her certification,

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and became the first black
woman engineer at NASA.

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And just the perseverance she had to show,

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she knew she belonged.

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She knew that they needed her help

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to help get the first humans into space.

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And she persevered, amazing.

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- Today we want to talk
about women in astronomy,

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and who are the names that come to mind,

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when you think about women in astronomy,

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kind of in a context of
Women's History Month?

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- You know, what I love

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is that the history of women in astronomy

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goes back very very far.

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Women have always been there.

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They've always been making contributions.

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Many people have heard

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of the famous astronomer William Herschel,

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but his sister, Caroline,

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actually used his telescopes

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and discovered a number of comets.

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There's a woman I particularly admire

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named Phoebe Waterman Haas.

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She was one of the first women

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to operate the Lick Telescope.

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Women like Henrietta Leavitt,

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who worked up at the Harvard Observatory,

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and invented a way that
we actually learned

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how to measure the
distance to other galaxies.

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So women were there, making
fundamental discoveries,

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helping the science move along,

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but we don't know their
stories as well as we should.

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- One of my favorite women

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who have really made history in astronomy

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is Dr. Nancy Grace Roman.

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- What amazed me about her
is she had this opportunity

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to create an entire NASA science program,

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saying if you were going to lay out

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this astrophysics program,

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it's got to have a strong
research component,

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people doing the basic understanding

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of how do stars form,
how to galaxies evolve,

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how do we develop instrumentation

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and keep making better
and better instruments

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to measure stars and galaxies.

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And then she also, of course,
that critical piece for NASA

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helped really push the development

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of satellite after
satellite after satellite.

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- And in fact, there's a number
of people who have told me

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that it's hard to imagine
Hubble being in space

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if it wasn't for Nancy Grace Roman.

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And many people therefore refer to her

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as the mother of Hubble.

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And so I'm so excited,
because right after that,

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we're going to launch later this year

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the next big telescope
has now her name on it,

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Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

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- So it's really going
to be able to give us

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a comprehensive high resolution
picture, if you will,

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of the universe, in the infrared,

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really helping us understand the structure

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and origin of galaxies,
really getting at a lot

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of the forces in the
history of the universe,

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as we try to understand

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what is the structure of the universe?

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What does it tell us?

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How can we learn the
origins of the universe?

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How it evolves over time?

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What I really love is this idea

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that when we had the
Hubble Space Telescope,

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which Nancy Grace Roman pioneered,

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it caused us to rewrite
astronomy textbooks.

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The James Webb Space Telescope

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is going to take us to the next level,

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but then the Nancy Grace
Roman Telescope will again,

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really fundamentally change
and expand our understanding

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of the universe.

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- And I know from just the
last years of her life,

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she was excited about dark
energy, which of course,

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relates to the largest scale
structure of the universe

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that requires the type of measurements

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and large field of view,

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a hundred times the
field of view of Hubble,

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that this telescope was enabled.

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So it couldn't be more
excited to have her name

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on this next generation telescope,

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and have her legacy
celebrated in the heavens

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with all the thousands of scientists

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who are waiting for those data.

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- Thanks to NASA

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for naming this building
after Mary W. Jackson.

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And of course, thanks to all these women

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that we're celebrating, these
scientists and engineers

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who helped us move the sciences forward.

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And thank you for joining
us for another episode