George Fitzgerald Smoot III is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, Nobel laureate, and the second contestant to win the $1 million prize on Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer with John C. Mather that led to the "discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation".
Smoot at 2009 POVO conference in The Netherlands
Smoot celebrating his Nobel Prize at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 3 October 2006
Cosmic Background Explorer
The Cosmic Background Explorer, also referred to as Explorer 66, was a NASA satellite dedicated to cosmology, which operated from 1989 to 1993. Its goals were to investigate the cosmic microwave background radiation of the universe and provide measurements that would help shape our understanding of the cosmos.
Cosmic Background Explorer mission patch Explorer program← AMPTE-CCE (Explorer 65)Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (Explorer 67) →
Launch of the COBE spacecraft on 18 November 1989.
Diagram of COBE spacecraft