Forging the Future of Space Science The Next 50 Years (2010) / Chapter Skim
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From the Big Bang to the Nobel Prize and on to the James Webb Space Telescope--John C. Mather
From the Big Bang to the Nobel Prize and on to the James Webb Space Telescope--John C. Mather
Pages 3-21
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From page 3... ...
My dad was a professor investigating covered hot and cold spots in the radiation that reveal the breeding and feeding of dairy cattle, a subject at one the primordial density variations that enabled us to time of immense commercial importance to the state of exist. My current project, the James Webb Space Tele- New Jersey.
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From page 4... ...
to get the size of Earth and a rough distance to the But until recently, when the COBE satellite flew, we Moon, but everything else was too far away for them did not know the details of the starting point, so we to calculate. The other basic method astronomers use is did not know what computer simulations to run.
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of chemical elements and molecules, which absorb or As it happens, this Special Theory of Relativity also emit in very characteristic patterns. That means that we explains why the Michelson Morley experiment could can determine the chemistry and physical properties of not detect the "luminiferous ether" that was supposed distant stars by analyzing their spectra.
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, "Velocity-Distance Relation among Extra-Galactic Nebulae," Papers of Edwin Powell Hubble, 1900–1989, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. But it was wrong.
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Perhaps in hindsight we would say it could have been done given the motiva tion of a Nobel Prize, but serious scientists at that time gave up and did not try. It was not until 1965 that another team was moti vated to try.
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The first objects might have been very massive ball of primordial material could grow big enough to stars, maybe a few hundred times as massive as the Sun, kick off the expanding universe we see today. and they would have burned very hot (maybe 100,000 Needless to say, the conditions in such a little ball K)
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make a new team, composed of members of our team and two other teams, to define the new mission. So I moved to Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, The Future Maryland, to work on it.
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When I by stars through the infinite history of the universe, presented the first results to the American Astronomi- but it does not predict that the spectrum should match cal Society in January of 1990, I showed them a graph the perfect black radiator. So, in 1965 the Steady State that had the measurements as little boxes and the theory was already dying because of the discovery of the F IGURE 1.10 The COBE satellite in orbit 900 km above Earth.
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CMB, and in 1990 it became very difficult to make the Steady State match the CMB spectrum. In the end, we reduced the error bars to about 50 parts per million.
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that distant supernovas are too faint, quite a lot too The Nobel Prize faint -- about 20 percent or so -- way too much to be explained by experimental error. The interpretation was On October 3, 2006, I was awakened by a phone call that the universe is larger than it seems from the velocfrom Sweden, wanting to know if I were the real John ity of expansion, and that would be so if the universe has Mather who worked on the COBE satellite.
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The JWST Team "MY" NEW PROJECT: THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE The JWST project is led by project manager Phil SaIn 1995, the COBE mission was done, and I was writ- belhaus at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and ing a book about it with John Boslough. The HST was includes major contributions from other parts of NASA up and working beautifully after its repair, but it had at Marshall Space Flight Center, the Jet Propulsion been very difficult and costly.
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From page 14... ...
Science owes a lot to James Webb. For more details, consult the fine biography Powering Apollo by Henry Lambright.
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There ing teams can imagine and to be ready to catch the are four main scientific topics that will certainly be unimagined errors as well. The big test will be held at investigated by users of the telescope, along with many Johnson Space Center in the same vacuum tank used others that will be proposed by observers:
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From page 16... ...
First, they would be extremely hot, as expected from the lack of heavy chemical elements in them. Second, they would be embedded in the primordial hydrogen, so their ultraviolet radiation at rest wave lengths less than 0.1216 microns would be cut off by absorption by that intergalactic hydrogen.
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. Using infrared light, the we will look back in time to see how different the early Very Large Telescope in Chile has shown us that we galaxies were in shape, rotational characteristics, color, can see inside the dust clouds.
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The star Fomalhaut has a dust host stars, blocking starlight. The Hubble and Spitzer ring around it, offset a bit, and a good explanation is space telescopes have already been used to determine that there is a large planet at a particular spot, fairly far the orbit, temperature, and even the atmospheric composition of a few exoplanets.
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From page 19... ...
So, if we could find signs of oxygen in the a group of infrared telescopes flying in formation in atmosphere of an exoplanet, along with other signs space, relaying light beams to a combining station.. like carbon dioxide and water, we could argue we had This is called an interferometer, which can be used to found another Earth.
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From page 20... ...
Biologists are taking this question mentors Paul Richards, Mike Hauser, Pat Thaddeus, seriously and there is even a professional journal about and Nancy Boggess, my project managers, especially it: Origins of Life and Eolution of Biospheres, a journal Roger Mattson, Dennis McCarthy, Bernie Seery, and of the International Astrobiology Society. So if there Phil Sabelhaus, and at NASA Headquarters, especially are other chemical systems that support life, at least we Ed Weiler, have all made enormous changes to my life.
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