A History of Women in Astronomy and Space Exploration

Exploring the Trailblazers of STEM

Dale DeBakcsy

• Publisher: Pen & Sword History
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781399045346
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

For the last four hundred years, women have played a part far in excess of their numerical representation in the history of astronomical research and discovery. It was a woman who gave us our first tool for measuring the distances between stars, and another who told us for the first time what those stars were made of. It was women who first noticed the rhythmic noise of a pulsar, the temperature discrepancy that announced the existence of white dwarf stars, and the irregularities in galactic motion that informed us that the universe we see might be only a small part of the universe that exists. And yet, in spite of the magnitude of their achievements, for centuries women were treated as essentially second class citizens within the astronomical community, contained in back rooms, forbidden from communicating with their male colleagues, provided with repetitive and menial tasks, and paid starvation wages. This book tells the tale of how, in spite of all those impediments, women managed, by sheer determination and genius, to unlock the secrets of the night sky. It is the story of some of science's most hallowed names - Maria Mitchell, Caroline Herschel, Vera Rubin, Nancy Grace Roman, and Jocelyn Bell-Burnell - and also the story of scientists whose accomplishments were great, but whose names have faded through lack of use - Queen Seondeok of Korea, who built an observatory in the 7th century that still stands today, Wang Zhenyi, who brought heliocentrism to China, Margaret Huggins, who perfected the techniques that allowed us to photograph stellar spectra and thereby completely changed the direction of modern astronomy, and Hisako Koyama, whose multi-decade study of the sun's surface is as impressive a feat of steadfast scientific dedication as it is a rigorous and valuable treasure trove of solar data. A History of Women in Astronomy and Space Exploration is not only a book, however, of those who study space, but of those who have ventured into it, from the fabled Mercury 13, whose attempt to join the American space program was ultimately foiled by betrayal from within, to mythical figures like Kathryn Sullivan and Sally Ride, who were not only pioneering space explorers, but scientific researchers and engineers in their own rights, aided in their work by scientists like Mamta Patel Nagaraja, who studied the effects of space upon the human body, and computer programmers like Marianne Dyson, whose simulations prepared astronauts for every possible catastrophe that can occur in space. Told through over 130 stories spanning four thousand years of humanity's attempt to understand its place in the cosmos, A History of Women in Astronomy and Space Exploration brings us at last the full tale of women's evolution from instrument makers and calculators to the theorists, administrators, and explorers who have, while receiving astonishingly little in return, given us, quite literally, the universe.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• A Note on Inclusion
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Queen Seondeok and the Construction of East Asia’s First Astronomical Observatory
• Chapter 2 Brief Portraits: Antiquity and the Middle Ages
• Chapter 3 Kepler, for the People: Maria Cunitz’s Urania Propitia and the Popularisation of Heliocentrism
• Chapter 4 Maria Winkelmann and the Guilded Age of Astronomy
• Chapter 5 Eight Comets, 2,500 Nebulae: Caroline Herschel’s Century of Astronomy
• Chapter 6 Champion of Chinese Heliocentrism: How Wang Zhenyi Went from Horseback Martial Artist to Stellar Mathematician
• Chapter 7 Brief Portraits: The Early Modern Era
• Chapter 8 Computing Venus: The Trailblazing Path of Maria Mitchell
• Chapter 9 The Secrets Stars Keep: Lady Margaret Huggins, Pioneer of Spectral Photography
• Chapter 10 Making Spectroscopy Hip: Agnes Mary Clerke at the Nerve Centre of Nineteenth-Century Astrophysics
• Chapter 11 ‘The Somewhat Nerve-Wearing Experience’: How Sarah Frances Whiting Changed the Course of Women’s Scientific Education
• Chapter 12 ‘Bordering on the Marvellous’: The Astronomical Menagerie of Williamina Paton Fleming
• Chapter 13 Brief Portraits: The Great Nineteenth-Century Explosion
• Chapter 14 Summing the Cosmos: Henrietta Swan Leavitt and the Saga of the Cepheid Stars
• Chapter 15 She Filled the Sky: Annie Jump Cannon, Iron Woman of Astronomy
• Chapter 16 Hydrogen Rules the Universe: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and the Composition of Stars
• Chapter 17 Before There Was Sagan: How Helen Sawyer Hogg Brought Astronomy to the People
• Chapter 18 She Followed the Sun: Ruby Payne-Scott, the World’s First Woman Radio Astronomer
• Chapter 19 One Life for the Sun: Hisako Koyama’s Half Century of Solar Observation
• Chapter 20 Margaret Burbridge and the Dawn of Nucleosynthesis Theory
• Chapter 21 Beatrice Tinsley, the Birth of Galaxies, and the Ever-Expanding Universe
• Chapter 22 Legacy Suspended: Vera Rubin and the Ongoing Saga of Dark Matter
• Chapter 23 Of Listening and Waiting: Jill Tarter and the First Forty Years of SETI
• Chapter 24 Nancy Grace Roman and the Birth of the Hubble Space Telescope
• Chapter 25 Studies in Expectation: Jocelyn Bell Burnell and the Discovery of Pulsars
• Chapter 26 Jane Luu and the Discovery of the Kuiper Belt
• SPACE EXPLORATION
• Selected Reading List
• Plates Section