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 Edward L. Wright – WISE Principal Investigator
Ned Wright
grew up in Fairfax County, VA on land once owned by George Washington.
He built a 6 inch telescope while in high school, polishing the mirror
himself. He went off to Harvard for college, majoring in physics. He
spent a year after college working for the Naval Research Laboratory in
the Underwater Sound division. He got into infrared astronomy as a
graduate student at Harvard by helping to build, fly and analyze the
data from Giovanni Fazio's 102-cm balloon borne telescope. He also
went on many observing runs at Kitt Peak, Mt. Hopkins, Cerro Tololo,
Las Campanas and South Africa with single channel bolometers, indium
antiminide and even lead sulfide detectors. Many apparently beautiful
nights were ruined by thin cirrus clouds whose thermal infrared
emission would make the pen on the strip chart literally slam from one
stop to the other. One of the big advantages space has over
ground-based IR astronomy is the absence of bad weather.
After Harvard Ned went to the Physics Department at MIT and got
involved in planning and designing the COsmic Background Explorer
(COBE) and in using the the Kuiper Airborne Observatory (KAO). Seeking
clearer skies he went to UCLA starting full time in 1982. When the
SIRTF (now Spitzer) science working group was selected in 1984, Wright
was one of the two interdisciplinary scientists chosen. The other was
his colleague in the next office at UCLA, Mike Jura.
In 1998 Ned Wright and Peter Eisenhardt got together to setup a
proposal team for what was then called the Next Generation Sky Survey
(NGSS). When the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) became JWST,
and TRW became NGST, NASA directed NGSS to choose a new name and WISE
was born.
In his spare time Ned Wright likes to play around with HTML,
Javascript, Java and the World Wide Web. He has a cosmology
tutorial web site that is usually close to the top of a Google
search on "cosmology". Sometimes the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy
Probe (WMAP) edges ahead into first place, but Ned has been involved in
this project since it was just a concept.
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