Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA) will host John C. Mather, a senior astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and senior project scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope, to accept the 2023 Joseph Priestley Award. As part of the celebration, Dr. Mather will deliver the public Priestley Award lecture, "Opening the Infrared Treasure Chest with the James Webb Space Telescope," on Tuesday, March 28, 2023 at 7:00 p.m. in the Anita Tuvin Schlechter (ATS) Auditorium. This event is free and open to the public. Masks are optional but welcome. The lecture will also be livestreamed on YouTube.
The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, is NASA’S largest and most powerful space science telescope. Peering back in time, it probes the cosmos to uncover the history of the universe from the Big Bang to alien planet formation and beyond. 100 times more powerful than the celebrated Hubble Space Telescope, Webb can detect the heat signature of a bumblebee at the Earth-Moon distance. Dr. Mather will discuss how the JSWT was built and what scientists hope to find. Webb is a joint project of NASA with the European and Canadian space agencies.
Biography (provided by the speaker)
Dr. John C. Mather is a Senior Astrophysicist and is the Senior Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Since the project started in 1995, he has led the JWST science teams. As a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, he led the proposal efforts for the Cosmic Background Explorer (74-76), and came to GSFC to be the Study Scientist (76-88), Project Scientist (88-98), and the Principal Investigator for the Far IR Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) on COBE. With the COBE team, he showed that the cosmic microwave background radiation has a blackbody spectrum within 50 parts per million, confirming the expanding universe model to extraordinary accuracy. The COBE team also made the first map of the hot and cold spots in the background radiation (anisotropy). Dr. Mather received the Nobel Prize in Physics (2006) with George Smoot, for the COBE work.
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