The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has awarded its inaugural Mani L. Bhaumik Breakthrough of the Year Award to standout contributors to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has awarded its inaugural Mani L. Bhaumik Breakthrough of the Year Award to standout contributors to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, also known as Webb or JWST. It honors three individuals who supported vast swaths of the Webb community over decades and whose persistence ensured the mission’s success.
The award recognizes former NASA Administrator Charles Frank Bolden Jr.; Dr. John Mather, senior project scientist of Webb since 1995; and Bill Ochs, Webb project manager from 2011 through the telescope’s launch in 2021.
The award selection committee sought to acknowledge not only the winners’ individual contributions, but the teams they inspired, whose collective work has given us all a completely different view of the universe.
The Bhaumik Breakthrough of the Year Award builds upon the Science Breakthrough of the Year, the journal’s choice of the top research advance of the year. In 2022, the successful deployment of Webb, and the first images revealed on July 12, earned Science’s “breakthrough” status. The inaugural award represents three key groups: the scientists, the engineers, and the leaders who advocated for the Webb mission.
Bolden, a retired U.S. Marine Corps major general and a former astronaut who served as administrator of NASA from 2009 to 2017, was passionate about the telescope. With a deep understanding of its potential for scientific discovery he made the telescope’s completion an agency-wide priority.
“This telescope was going to revolutionize our understanding of astrophysics,” said Bolden, whose enthusiasm for Webb came in part from his time as co-pilot crew member of the mission that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. “What we’d learn from JWST would dwarf what we’d learned from Hubble.”
Mather played a key role in the project from the earliest days. In his work leading the Webb telescope science team beginning in 1995, Mather represented scientific interests to project management and helped see each step forward, no matter how small.
“We set ourselves an incredible challenge,” said Mather. “The telescope represented a very revolutionary idea, and we had to invent many things.” His work included setting up international science contests to find the best talent to invent the right instruments and technologies for the telescope, and to bring the same inventions to life.”
Ochs, who served as Webb project manager starting in 2011 – representing both engineering and science teams – confronted challenges in terms of schedule and budget.
“I had to learn this huge, complex mission and figure out a new launch estimate and cost estimate,” said Ochs. He was very focused on the people at the center of the project.
“I am very honored to have been selected as one of the recipients of the Bhaumik Breakthrough of the Year Award by the AAAS,” Ochs said. “Leading the JWST team for almost 12 years was extraordinarily special. The ‘Webb Experience’ not only allowed me to work with some the smartest people I have ever met, but also the best all-around individuals you could ever encounter. It was the best 12 years of my career.”
On May 3, an event at AAAS headquarters in Washington, D.C., will honor Ochs, Mather, and Bolden. Each winner will speak about their time serving the Webb telescope community.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s largest, most powerful, and most complex space science telescope ever built. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.
By Robert Gutro and Thaddeus Cesari
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.