KUSF 02.14.09 8-11 PM Classical Salon DJ David Reffkin

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3rd Hour
Dr. John Mather interview of the James Webb Space Telescope





John C. Mather, like many Nobel Laureates before him, autographs a chair at Kafé Satir at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, 6 December 2006.
Copyright © The Nobel Museum 2006
Photo: Fredrik Persson

Dr. John C. Mather is a Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. His research centers on infrared astronomy and cosmology. As an NRC postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (New York City), he led the proposal efforts for the Cosmic Background Explorer (74-76), and came to GSFC to be the Study Scientist (76-88), Project Scientist (88-98), and also the Principal Investigator for the Far IR Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) on COBE. He showed that the cosmic microwave background radiation has a blackbody spectrum within 50 ppm. As Senior Project Scientist (95-present) for the James Webb Space Telescope, he leads the science team, and represents scientific interests within the project management. He has served on advisory and working groups for the National Academy of Sciences, NASA, and the NSF (for the ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, and for the CARA, the Center for Astrophysical Research in the Antarctic).
Dr. John C. Mather of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Mather shares the prize with George F. Smoot of the University of California for their collaborative work on understanding the Big Bang. Mather and Smoot analyzed data from NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), which studied the pattern of radiation from the first few instants after the universe was formed.

In 1992, the COBE team announced that they had mapped the primordial hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background radiation. These spots are related to the gravitational field in the early universe, only instants after the Big Bang, and are the seeds for the giant clusters of galaxies that stretch hundreds of millions of light years across the universe. The team also showed that the big bang radiation has a spectrum that agrees exactly with the theoretical prediction, confirming the Big Bang theory and showing that the Big Bang was complete in the first instants, with only a tiny fraction of the energy released later.

Currently, Dr. Mather is working on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), where he is the senior project scientist. JWST will be the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and is scheduled to launch in 2013.

Dr. Mather is the author of many publications, including his book, "The Very First Light", which was written along with John Boslough and is now in its 2nd edition (2008).

http://astrophysics.gsfc.nasa.gov/staff/CVs/John.Mather/

http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/