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April 1, 2008 - NASA Nobel Prize Recipient to Focus on Telescope Science Activitie
NASA scientist and 2006 Nobel Prize recipient John Mather will devote more of his time at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., to provide additional focus and support as senior project scientist and chair of the Science Working Group for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Mather has been dividing his time in that role and serving as lead scientist in the Office of the Chief Scientist within the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington since April 2007.
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Dr. John C. Mather of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has 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.