NASA's Science Chief on Roman Telescope's Quest to Answer Humanity's Biggest Questions

Nicola Fox was two years old when her father carried her from the car and pointed at the moon. "Just think, men are up there right now," he told her. That moment, repeated across her childhood in England, planted something that would grow into a career at the highest levels of space science. Decades later, Fox would find herself in the launch readiness review for NASA's Artemis mission, and she would think about what her father might have made of that arc—the small child he held becoming the scientist overseeing one of humanity's most ambitious attempts to understand the cosmos.

Fox's path to NASA was neither inevitable nor direct. She grew up in an all-girls school, an environment she credits with shielding her from the gender stereotypes that might have steered her away from physics. She loved the subject genuinely, without the burden of being told it wasn't for her. But she never imagined working for NASA. Her breakthrough came by accident—a chance conversation at a graduate conference in Alaska with someone from the agency led to a two-year postdoctoral position in Maryland. She had planned to return to England. Instead, she accepted a job at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and stayed in the United States for two decades before NASA brought her back.

Today, Fox oversees the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a project that represents a fundamental leap in humanity's ability to see and measure the universe. The scale of the difference is almost difficult to grasp. What took Hubble a century to accomplish, Roman will complete in a single month. Every day, the telescope transmits 1.4 terabytes of data back to Earth—more information in twenty-four hours than Hubble could gather in a hundred years. Fox calls it the biggest astrophysics telescope in terms of the sheer volume of data it provides.

The questions Roman is designed to answer are among the oldest and most profound that science can ask. How does the universe actually work? What is humanity's place within it? Are we alone? These are not small questions, and they require instruments of extraordinary power. One of Roman's primary missions is to study dark matter, the invisible substance that Fox describes as the fabric holding the universe together. When you look out at galaxies and stars and planets, she explains, there is dark matter between them—everywhere, invisible, impossible to measure directly because you cannot see it. Roman will help scientists understand what it is and how it shapes everything we observe.

The telescope will also turn its instruments toward planets orbiting distant stars, searching for signs that life might exist beyond Earth. Roman's equipment is powerful enough to detect the atmospheres surrounding these exoplanets and analyze their chemical composition. Scientists will look for the ingredients—the specific mix of gases and conditions—that might sustain life as we understand it. This is not speculation. It is a systematic search for the building blocks of biology on worlds we have never visited and may never reach.

For Fox, this question carries personal weight. She thinks about how life emerged on Earth and wonders whether it began elsewhere in the solar system when it was younger, only to fail to take hold. She thinks about whether life started on Mars. These are the mysteries her team studies constantly, and she hopes to see them answered in her lifetime. The Roman telescope is her instrument for that search.

When asked about encouraging young people to pursue science, Fox pushes back against a common assumption. You do not need to be exceptionally smart to become a scientist, she says. You need to be curious. You need to ask questions. You need to want to know more about things—anything, not necessarily space. Her own path began with a father pointing at the moon and a child's wonder. It continued through accident and choice and decades of work. Now, with Roman, she is part of an effort to answer questions that have haunted human consciousness since we first looked up at the night sky and asked what was out there.