Nobel Prize-winning Research Started with Balloon Flights

When the Nobel Prize in Physics was announced in Stockholm, Sweden, last fall, there was celebration in Palestine, Texas, home of the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility.

That’s because the scientific balloon program, operated for NASA by New Mexico State University’s Physical Science Laboratory, helped blaze the trail to what was described as one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century.

John Mather, a senior astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and George Smoot, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, shared the $1.4 million Nobel Prize for discovering the nature of “blackbody radiation” and affirming the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.

Mather and Smoot were the chief architects of NASA’s COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite, launched in 1989, which provided precise measurements of the microwave radiation coming from all directions of the universe. But much of the research leading to the development and success of COBE was done aboard high-altitude scientific balloons launched by CSBF.

“A lot of the early work in cosmology, particularly in microwave background radiation, was done on balloons here,” said Danny Ball, CSBF site manager. “Many of the detectors on COBE were tested first on our balloon flights, and probably about half of the people on the COBE science team are current or former balloon scientists. George Smoot was a longtime user of balloons, from the 70s through the early 90s.”