In his thesis work, he designed an instrument to observe the cosmic microwave background radiation from a stratospheric balloon. The results convinced him of the need to conduct observations from space.

Following his postdoctoral contract with the National Research Council (NRC), at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (1974-1976), he organized and directed the proposal that led to the COBE satellite (Cosmic Background Explorer) and worked as a “Study Scientist” (1976-1988) and “Project Scientist” (1988-1998).

He was the principal investigator of the FIRAS instrument (Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer), which measured the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background.

In 1995, NASA selected him as the Study Scientist for the Next Generation Space Telescope project. Upon approval, they renamed the project the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), with Muther as Project Scientist. He led all phases of construction and commissioning, leading up to its launch in 2021 and beyond, through 2023.

Thanks to FIRAS, the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) was observed, which helped establish the evolutionary model of the universe ("Big Bang"), a result that earned John Mather the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006.

The JWST is an infrared telescope with photometric and spectroscopic instruments, operating from the L2 Lagrangian point in Earth's orbit around the Sun, at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. It is by far the largest telescope ever put into orbit. The project is a combined effort of the three space agencies: NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

Technically, its construction and launch were highly complex, requiring 14 years longer than NASA had anticipated. Only the mettle of someone like Mather could have carried out the project so successfully.

Its advantages are:

1. Outstanding angular resolution (< 0.1 arc seconds in all bands).

• A penetration through interstellar dust to observe many processes directly.

• A very deep reach into the universe, reaching objects with “redshift” greater than 10, until times when the universe was less than 500 million years old (its current age is 13.7 billion years).

It is worth noting that astrophysicists from the University of La Laguna and the Instituto Astrofísica de Canarias are using the JWST to observe a variety of fields, including: the physics of asteroids and minor bodies in the Solar System; the properties of planetary nebulae; the structures of galaxies in the early Universe; the foundations of cosmology; supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies; the abundances of chemical elements in the Milky Way and Andromeda; hot stars in the Magellanic Clouds; and star formation around galactic nuclei.

Mather continues to work at NASA (at the Goddard Center), which has accepted into the study phase his project for a "sunshade satellite" to occult individual stars and thus dramatically facilitate the study of their (exo)planets. It would be available in orbit for combination with several other satellites with different types of instrumentation.

John Mather will be in La Palma at the end of April to attend the Starmus 7 festival, which is a good opportunity to offer him an honorary doctorate from the University of La Laguna. On the way to that meeting, Mather will give a lecture at the XVII Congress of Physics Students, and on May 9th, he will give another lecture at the Museum of Science and the Cosmos.

John Beckham

Candidacy proposal submitted to
the Cloister on February 24, 2025