May 2 1997
From The Space Library
NASA announced that John C. Mather, a senior astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center, had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, often considered the highest recognition possible for scientists and engineers. Mather's work at NASA had begun in 1974, specifically, on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) spacecraft. He had served as a project scientist when NASA launched the spacecraft in 1989, and in 1992 he had participated in the COBE project, which effectively mapped primordial hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background radiation. The map demonstrated that radiation from the Big Bang conformed to theoretical predictions, providing new evidence for the long-standing Big Bang theory. Mather received his PhD in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1974.
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