Cosmic Dawn with Nobel Laureate John Mather

  • Released Wednesday, December 17, 2025
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The James Webb Space Telescope is doing something astronomers dreamed about for decades: peering into our universe’s early past, a period known as cosmic dawn. A new NASA+ documentary—also called Cosmic Dawn—chronicles the inside story of Webb’s design, construction, and launch. John Mather, who won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics, proposed the telescope and led its science team for decades. In this interview, Mather talks about his life, his research, and the pre-dawn phone call telling him he had won the Nobel Prize.

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Music: "The Palace of Discovery," Universal Production Music

Complete transcript available.

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NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

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This page was originally published on Wednesday, December 17, 2025.
This page was last updated on Friday, December 19, 2025 at 2:54 PM EST.