Natalie Wolchover won a Pulitzer Prize for her work atQuanta Magazine explaining the intricate story of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.
Since the magazine's inception, Wolchover has been a senior writer and editor atQuanta. She was a staff writer for Live Science from 2010 to 2012 The magazine received the Pulitzer in the category of explanatory reporting.
The Pulitzer committee awarded the prize for Explanatory Reporting in the year 2022.
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When the news came through, she was recovering from her illness. She joked that she was lying in bed in a daze trying to believe that she was not dreaming.
She said it was a great honor for the whole team and for the ethos of science journalism. If it works
The bedeviling engineering process that produced the James Webb Space Telescope, a $10 billion observatory that launched more than a decade late and very much over budget, is the subject of a beautifully written tale. She notes that even after launch, there were many issues to contend with.
She describes how the telescope was delicately folded into the rocket to be unfurled in space for the long journey to a deep-space location where a sun shield must be executed just right to keep the telescope shielded from sun that would interfere with IR observations.
The sun shield is the only hope and its weakness. She wrote that the sun shield must consist of thin fabric in order to unfurl to large proportions.
She elaborated on the fabric issue after talking about the necessity of getting the observatory to space.
I'm lying in bed in a COVID daze struggling to believe that this is real and not a fever dream. I mean, holy crap. Thank you all for the nice messages!!! https://t.co/BZqYpJOkrvMay 9, 2022
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The unavoidable use of fabric makes it an inherently risky endeavor. Engineers say that fabric is nondeterministic and can't be perfectly controlled or predicted. The whole telescope will become junk if the sun shield fails.
After nearly five months of operation in space, NASA announced in May that the observatory is close to the home stretch of the 1,000-step period. The first images from the telescope will be in July.
If all goes to plan, the research will try to understand the forces that shaped the universe, as it probes the early universe.
Between 2010 and 2012 Wolchover was a staff writer at Live Science. In her last few months at LiveScience, she wrote about the top mysteries of physics, a discussion about whether the Voyager 1 spacecraft had left the solar system, and the physics of the first supersonic space Occasionally, he wrote for Space.com.
According to her Live Science biography, she studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley and won many other journalistic prizes before the Pulitzer. She won two awards in 2017: the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for young science journalists and the Science Communication Award for the American Institute of physics.
Her work has been published in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Writing on Mathematics, Nature, The New Yorker and Popular Science.
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