The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Mather and George Smoot “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.” 1,2 Mather and Smoot were leading members of a large team that designed, built, and operated NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer. COBE was launched into a 900-km-high polar Earth orbit in November 1989 and, over the next four years, observed the spectral and spatial properties of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) over the whole sky.

Mather, lead scientist of the COBE project, has been at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, since 1976, when the project began in earnest. Smoot, who had charge of COBE’s differential microwave radiometer (DMR), one of the satellite’s three principal instruments, has been at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1970. For the past 12 years, he has also...

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