Our Place in the Universe: NASA's John Mather on the James Webb Telescope

In this episode...

Dr. John Mather is a Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory located at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD.* He is also the Senior Project Scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be the largest, most powerful and complex space telescope ever built and launched into space. It will fundamentally alter our understanding of the universe.

*This episode was originally published in February, 2021.

Dr. John Mather is a Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. He is also the Senior Project Scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be the largest, most powerful and complex space telescope ever built and launched into space. It will fundamentally alter our understanding of the universe.

The Very First Light

Mather was winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics with George Smoot for their work in the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) mission in the mid 1970s to measure the heat radiation from the Big Bang. Mather and his team measured the cosmic microwave background radiation—basically very faint radio noise astronomers had theorized could only come from the most distant events at the beginning of time as we know it—and their measurements confirmed the Big Bang theory to extraordinary accuracy.

The Premiere Space Observatory: The James Webb Space Telescope

Visiting JWST while it was at NASA Goddard in 2014

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a large infrared telescope will be the premier space observatory of the next decade, and Mather has been the Senior Scientist on this project from it’s origin in 1995. The James Webb is scheduled to launch in 2021 and will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System.

UPDATE: JWST launched successfully in December 2021 and the team released its first public images in July 2022. They are stunning and breathtaking. Read more about why seeing these images brought me to tears….

Time Magazine's Top 100 Most Influential People

In 2007, Mather was listed among Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in The World. In October, 2012, he was listed again by Time magazine in a special issue on New Space Discoveries as one of 25 most influential people in space.

Dr. Mather is the author of many publications, including his book, “The Very First Light.”

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail. Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.
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Episode 15
NASA’s John Mather: The James Webb Telescope

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