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FORGING THE FUTURE OF SPACE SCIENCE
THE NEXT 50 YEARS
September 10, 2007
Maryland Science Center
Baltimore, MD at the Inner Harbor
FORUM ON THE FUTURE OF SPACE SCIENCE
MSC Theater (2:30 p.m. – 5:15p.m.)
Dr. Matt Mountain, Director, Space Telescope Science Institute
Dr. Christopher O. Justice, Professor and Research Director, Geography Department, University of Maryland
Dr. Laurie Leshin, Director, Sciences and Exploration, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Dr. Robert Strain, Head, Space Department, Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University
FROM THE BIG BANG TO THE NOBEL PRIZE AND ON TO THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE
IMAX Theater (7:30 p.m.)
Featuring Lecturer Dr. John Mather
Senior Astrophysicist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics
View a brief biography
Local co-host: Space Telescope Science Institute
WEBCAST AND PRESENTATIONS
Sponsored by:
The National Academies
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Boeing
Lockheed Martin
Northrop Grumman
Orbital Sciences Corporation
ATK
Ball Aerospace
Aerospace Corporation
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Co-sponsored by:
American Astronautical Society
American Astronomical Society
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
COSPAR
International Space University
National Space Society
Planetary Society
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DR. JOHN C. MATHER
John C. Mather, a senior astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), is a co-recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics. He shares the prize with George F. Smoot of the University of California, Berkeley, for their collaborative work on understanding the Big Bang. Drs. 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 it 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 now 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.
Dr. Mather began his career as a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies where he led the proposal efforts for the Cosmic Background Explorer (1974-76). In 1976, he joined the NASA GSFC as a study scientist, serving next as a project scientist (1988-98), and then as 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. Currently, as senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, he leads the science team and represents scientific interests within project management.
Dr. Mather has served on advisory and working groups for the National Academy of Sciences, NASA, and the NSF Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and the Center for Astrophysical Research in the Antarctic (CARA). He is a member of the Astrophysics Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Committee and of the Standing Review Board for the Kepler project. Dr. Mather is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Biography source:
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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