When Nancy Grace Roman was 11 years old, her family was living in Reno. She was enthralled by the stars in the clear night skies and joined with friends in forming an astronomy club.

It was the beginning of a lifelong fascination with the cosmos.

When she died on Christmas Day in Germantown, Md., at 93, Dr. Roman was remembered as “the mother of the Hubble.”

As NASA’s first chief of astronomy and the first woman in a leadership position at the space agency, Dr. Roman oversaw the early planning for the Hubble Space Telescope, which began orbiting Earth above its atmosphere in April 1990 to capture an unobstructed view of the universe.

Placed into orbit from a manned Discovery shuttle and named for the pioneering American astronomer Edwin Hubble, it became the first large optical telescope in space. It has enhanced knowledge of distant galaxies as well as planets in our own solar system by transmitting images that would have been distorted if it were operating from within the Earth’s atmosphere.