Science writer Natalie Wolchover has received a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for her work at Quanta magazine explaining the complex history of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in December.
Wolchover is an editor and managing editor for Quanta who has been there since the magazine’s inception in 2013. From 2010 to 2012, she served as managing editor. (opens in a new tab) for Space.com’s sister site, Live Science. The Pulitzer, awarded May 9 to the magazine with a special mention for Wolchover, was awarded in the category of explanatory reporting.
The Pulitzer Committee awarded the 2022 Explanatory Report Prize “for coverage that revealed the intricacies of the construction of the James Webb Space Telescope, designed to facilitate groundbreaking astronomical and cosmological research,” the organization said. (opens in a new tab).
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Wolchover was recovering from COVID-19 when the news reached him. “I’m lying in bed in a COVID dizziness struggling to believe this is real and not a fever dream,” she joked on Twitter (opens in a new tab).
“It’s a wonderful recognition for our entire team and for the philosophy of science journalism,” she added of the award-winning story. (opens in a new tab)titled “The Webb Space Telescope Will Rewrite Cosmic History. If It Works.”
Wolchover’s story elegantly traces the complicated engineering process that produced the James Webb Space Telescope, a $10 billion observatory that launched more than a decade late and way over budget. She notes that even after the launch (which took place on December 25, 2021; the article was published on December 3), Webb still faced many problems when going live.
For example, she describes how the telescope was carefully folded into the rocket to be deployed into space for the long journey to a deep-space location, where a sunshade must be run just to keep the telescope in sight. shielded from the sun which would interfere with the infrared. observations.
“The sunshade is both an infrared telescope’s only hope and its Achilles’ heel. In order to deploy to large enough proportions without weighing down a rocket, the sunshade must be made of a thin fabric “, she wrote.
After discussing Webb’s tiny mass compared to a ground-based telescope, a necessity to get the groundbreaking observatory into space, she delved into the matter of the fabric.
I’m lying in bed in a COVID dizziness struggling to believe this is real and not a fever dream. I mean, damn it. Thank you all for the kind messages!!! https://t.co/BZqYpJOkrvMay 9, 2022
“Nothing about building a giant yet lightweight infrared-sensing spacecraft is easy, but the inevitable use of fabric makes it an inherently risky business,” Wolchover said. “The fabric is, say the engineers, ‘non-deterministic’, its movements impossible to control or predict perfectly. If the sunshade snags as it extends, the entire telescope will turn into space junk.”
Fortunately, Webb’s deployment went very well and after almost five consecutive months of commissioning in space, NASA also coincidentally announced in May that the observatory was in the “last line” of the commissioning period in 1,000 steps. The first scientific images from the space telescope are expected in July.
Wolchover also notes in the article the groundbreaking research Webb will perform if all goes according to plan, as he probes the early universe, searches for early galaxies, and otherwise tries to understand the forces that shaped the cosmos.
Wolchover was a staff writer at LiveScience, a sister publication to Space.com, between 2010 and 2012. Notable stories she wrote for LiveScience in her final months included describing major mysteries in physics. (opens in a new tab)a discussion of whether the Voyager 1 spacecraft had left the solar system (opens in a new tab)and the physics of the first supersonic space dive (opens in a new tab). Wolchover has also written occasionally for Space.com.
She has a bachelor’s degree in physics from Tufts University and studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley, according to her Live Science biography, and before the Pulitzer won numerous other journalism awards. She was the 2016 recipient of the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Prize, an annual award for young science journalists, and the recipient of the 2017 Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics.
“His work has also appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Writing on Mathematics, Nature, The New Yorker and Popular Science,” states his Live Science biography. (opens in a new tab).
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.