John Mather

From Slackerpedia Galactica

John C. Mather is an observational cosmologist, specializing in observational studies of the Cosmic Microwave Background. Mather is most notable for being one of the proposers of the COBE Satellite, and the Principal Investigator for the Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) instrument package on that satellite, responsible for determining that the cosmic microwave background spectrum is that of a blackbody. This discovery provided what remains the strongest evidence that the universe began with The Big Bang.

He has received many awards for his work, but is certainly most notable for being co-recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics (along with George Smoot) for the accomplishments of the COBE mission. Although best-known for COBE, he is actively involved in many current and future infrared astrophysics missions (both balloon-borne and space-based), and is currently a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center.