Nobel physicist focuses on Hubble’s heir

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

SEATTLE - The two buttons on NASA senior astrophysicist John Mather's lapel say it all.

One is a tiny gold medallion that you would hardly notice — until Mather points out that it's a miniature of the Nobel Prize he won last year, for his work on interpreting the rippled fingerprint left behind by cosmic creation. The other is a gaudy campaign button, emblazoned with the words "ASK ME ABOUT JWST."

That's a reference to the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's designated heir to the Hubble Space Telescope — and Mather's scientific baby.

Mather won a share of the Nobel Prize in physics for his work with the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, or COBE, which detected subtle temperature variations in the full-sky cosmic microwave background radiation. Those observations led to the conclusion that those variations reflected ripples in density that gave rise to the first generation of stars and galaxies.

He's still accepting accolades for that research, which dates back more than a decade. But because he's the senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, he's putting at least as much emphasis on preparations for the $3.5 billion observatory's scheduled launch in 2013.

"I've been involved in this since the very first day of this project, and so I had a strong influence on both the telescope design and on the instrument package selection," Mather, 60, told MSNBC.com Monday during the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

The Webb telescope is designed to look farther into the cosmic past than Hubble, using a suite of cameras optimized for infrared wavelengths. The telescope's mirror is seven times larger than Hubble's — so large that it has to be folded up for its launch on a European Ariane 5 rocket. The instruments have to be kept so cold that a shade the size of a tennis court will shield it from the sun's rays. And it's due to travel so far away — 1 million miles from Earth — that it will take at least two months to get there.

At that distance, the Webb telescope can hover around a gravitational balance point known as L2, providing a steady vantage point for observations. But it will also be beyond any hope of servicing by astronauts, a la Hubble. Instead, the telescope's optics are designed so that they can be adjusted by remote control, thus avoiding the problem that marred Hubble's first years in orbit.

The Webb telescope is slated for an operating life of five years — but that could be extended, just as the nearly 17-year-old Hubble's life has been repeatedly extended.

Will the findings from Webb bring future Nobel Prizes for Mather and his colleagues?

"That's a good question," he said. "I'd like to imagine that the JWST will open up such a wonderful new area of science that someone will find a Nobel Prize-winning discovery in there, but I don't know what it is. This is more of an exploration than a test of a particular theory. When you build a general-purpose tool, people will use it in ways you can never guess. That's what we're counting on."

Here are more questions and answers taken from Monday's interview with Mather:

MSNBC.com: How does all this work coming up fit with the work that you did with COBE, and that you won the Nobel Prize for? Is it completely different, or is it all of a piece?

Mather: Well, it's related, and it's also different. When I changed subjects from the work that I did on COBE and went into this area, I had to learn all new technology and meet a lot of new people. But in the end, it's very closely connected scientifically. Because the big bang, which we saw and measured with the COBE satellite, gives us the initial conditions. We saw with COBE that the early universe is not quite uniform. It's full of little hot and cold spots which are now thought to be density variations in the primordial material. The dense regions are thought to be the places where galaxies and clusters of galaxies would form, and the less dense regions are places which would empty out.

So everything that we have now and our own existence is presumed to be due to these initial conditions. Now, with the James Webb Space Telescope, we have the opportunity to make that connection and see the formation of the first things from the primordial seeds that were observed with COBE. In the end it's a very closely connected thing, but a very different technology to do it.

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