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.
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