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NASA's Roman Space Telescope is just one of a few missions named after real-life women
Most female-named spacecraft have drawn from mythology or from generic names associated with women.
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NASA's next big space telescope is not only meant to unlock some of the mysteries of dark energy. It also is a pioneer in the naming of missions.
Scientific American recently said that the observatory, which launched on Aug. 30, is the first ever space telescope ever named after a real-life woman: American astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, who supported development of the iconic Hubble Space Telescope and was NASA's first head of astronomy in the 1960s.
The story is very different when it comes to men. For example, NASA's "Great Observatories," which launched between 1990 and 2003, were all named after famous U.S. male astronomers or physicists: the Hubble Space Telescope (Edwin Hubble), the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (Arthur Compton), the Chandra X-ray Observatory (Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar) and the Spitzer Space Telescope (Lyman Spitzer).
Indeed, relatively few spacecraft of any kind have borne female names over the years — and most of the ones that did were not honoring actual, real-life people.
For instance, a number of missions with female names took them from mythology (e.g., NASA's Europa Clipper and China's Chang'e moon probes). Others used female names not attached to particular individuals (such as NASA's Clementine moon mission, and the European Space Agency's LISA, which is an acronym for "Laser Intraferometer Space Antenna.")
A notable exception is Sojourner, the mini-rover on NASA's Mars Pathfinder lander mission that was made famous again by the 2015 film "The Martian;" it's named after Sojourner Truth, a Civil War-era abolitionist. Sojourner's name was selected in 1995 from a worldwide naming contest for students and suggested by 12-year-old Valerie Ambroise of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Some other notable examples of missions honoring real-life women include:
Throughout history, the names of ocean-going ships — ships on the water, not spaceships — often have associations with women. The U.K.'s Imperial War Museums (IWM) suggests that women's names are used due to two traditions. The first is that, very generally speaking, the word "boat" is a "female" word in some languages that use gendered nouns, but that is by far not universal, even among the imperial sailing powers of the 1400s to 1600s.
The second association, which seems more likely, is the notion of a mother, goddess or similar "female figure" guiding a crew, which we see in theaters right now with "The Odyssey:" Athena helps Odysseus, reflecting the ancient Greek epic story. (For example, figureheads — sculptures on sailing ship prows — were often, although not always, carved in the likeness of women, Royal Museums Greenwich states.)