The success of COBE was the outcome of prodigious team work involving more than 1,000 researchers, engineers and other participants. John Mather coordinated the entire process and also had primary responsibility for the experiment that revealed the blackbody form of the microwave background radiation measured by COBE. George Smoot had main responsibility for measuring the small variations in the temperature of the radiation.
El COBE (Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer) fue el primer instrumento capaz de medir las anisotropías del fondo cósmico de microondas. La existencia de las anisotropías es una pieza clave para la formación de estructuras materiales en el modelo cosmológico del big-bang.
Mather era el jefe de proyecto del COBE además de investigador principal (el "PI" para los que gustan de abreviaturas) del instrumento FIRAS (Far InfraRed Absolute Spectrophotometer). La tarea del FIRAS fue de determinar el espectro del fondo y compararlo con la curva de cuerpo negro predicha.
Smooth era PI del DMR (Differential Microwave Radiometer). Este instrumento proporcionó evidencia de las anisotropías de 0.00001 grados con una resolución angular de 7° en el cielo.
La nota de prensa muestra también el descrubrimiento desde la perspectiva de las misiones actuales y futuras:
The COBE results provided increased support for the Big Bang scenario for the origin of the Universe, as this is the only scenario that predicts the kind of cosmic microwave background radiation measured by COBE. These measurements also marked the inception of cosmology as a precise science. It was not long before it was followed up, for instance by the WMAP satellite, which yielded even clearer images of the background radiation. Very soon the European Planck satellite will be launched in order to study the radiation in even greater detail.
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