Women In STEM Received Some Overdue Recognition In 2020

Mary Jackson At Work — HAMPTON, VA – 1977: Mathmatician Mary Jackson, the first black woman engineer at NASA poses for a … [+] photo at work at NASA Langley Research Center in 1977 in Hampton, Virginia. (Photo by Bob Nye/NASA/Donaldson Collection/Getty Images)

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2020 was a great year for recognizing the achievements of women in science and engineering. Here are a few of the year’s long-overdue nods to women who made science history.

Vera C. Rubin Observatory

The National Science Foundation started the year by naming an upcoming large ground-based observatory after astronomer Vera Rubin. The telescope, which is under construction, had previously been called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).

At a January event announcing the name, physicist Kathy Turner, a program manager at the Department of Energy’s Office of High-Energy Physics, told reporters that reading as an undergraduate about Rubin’s work taught her that, “yes, science is a field that women have a right to be in and a right to pursue, and we don’t have to take no for an answer.”

Rubin discovered the first evidence of dark matter in the 1970s, when she noticed that the galaxies she was observing all seemed to rotate as if they had much more mass than astronomers could see. Decades later, one of the Rubin Observatory’s main research goals will be to gather more data to help physicists figure out how dark matter fits into the structure of the universe. That work, and other observations at the new facility in Chile, should begin in November 2021.

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

NASA announced in May that the Hubble Space Telescope’s successor will named for the agency’s first chief astronomer, who played an instrumental role in making Hubble a reality: Nancy Grace Roman.

“It is because of Nancy Grace Roman’s leadership and vision that NASA became a pioneer in astrophysics and launched Hubble, the world’s most powerful and productive space telescope,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in a press release.

Prior to the announcement, the Roman Space Telescope had been known officially as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST. NASA plans to launch it by 2025.

Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters

In June, NASA renamed its Washington, D.C. headquarters building in honor of mathematician and engineer Mary Jackson, whose 27 years of work at NASA helped the agency design better, safer, faster aircraft and pave the way for crewed spaceflight.

“NASA facilities across the country are named after people who dedicated their lives to push the frontiers of the aerospace industry,” Bridenstine said in a press release. “Mary W. Jackson was part of a group of very important women who helped NASA succeed in getting American astronauts into space.”

Jackson joined NASA in 1951, when the agency was still called NACA and the workplace was strictly segregated by race and gender. In defiance of those barriers, Jackson became the agency’s first black female engineer, authored several research reports, and performed experiments in NASA’s supersonic wind tunnel.