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Suggested Citation:"John C. Mather." National Research Council. 2010. Forging the Future of Space Science: The Next 50 Years. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12675.
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JOHN C. MATHER is a senior astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). His research centers on infrared astronomy and cosmology. As a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (New York), he led the proposal efforts for the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) (1974–1976) and came to GSFC to be the study scientist (1976–1988), project scientist (1988–1998), and the principal investigator for the Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) on COBE. He and his team showed that the cosmic microwave background radiation has a blackbody spectrum within 50 parts per million, confirming the Big Bang theory to extraordinary accuracy. As senior project scientist (1995–present) for the James Webb Space Telescope, he leads the science team and represents scientific interests within the project management. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Nobel Prize in Physics (2006) with George Smoot for the COBE work.

Suggested Citation:"John C. Mather." National Research Council. 2010. Forging the Future of Space Science: The Next 50 Years. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12675.
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Forging the Future of Space Science: The Next 50 Years Get This Book
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From September 2007 to June 2008 the Space Studies Board conducted an international public seminar series, with each monthly talk highlighting a different topic in space and Earth science. The principal lectures from the series are compiled in Forging the Future of Space Science. The topics of these events covered the full spectrum of space and Earth science research, from global climate change, to the cosmic origins of life, to the exploration of the Moon and Mars, to the scientific research required to support human spaceflight.

The prevailing messages throughout the seminar series as demonstrated by the lectures in this book are how much we have accomplished over the past 50 years, how profound are our discoveries, how much contributions from the space program affect our daily lives, and yet how much remains to be done. The age of discovery in space and Earth science is just beginning. Opportunities abound that will forever alter our destiny.

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