Bennett led the effort to rebuild the radiometer front-end microwave components that succeeded in significantly enhancing the sensitivity of the DMR instrument.

[1] His National Academy of Sciences (NAS) membership citation states, "As leader of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mission, Bennett has helped quantify, with unprecedented precision and accuracy, many key properties of the universe, including its age, the dark and baryonic matter content, the cosmological constant, and the Hubble constant.

[9] The 2012 Gruber Cosmology Prize was awarded to "Charles L. Bennett and the WMAP Team" for "transforming our current paradigm of structure formation from appealing scenario into precise science."

[11] In 2015 Bennett was awarded the Caterina Tomassoni and Felice Pietro Chisesi Prize "For Dr. Bennett's leadership in two experiments on the Cosmic Microwave Background that literally changed our view of the Universe: COBE-DMR, leading to the discovery of primordial spatial fluctuations in the CMB, and WMAP, leading to precise measurements of the cosmological parameters and establishing -de facto- the Standard Cosmological Model".

AAAS President, David Oxtoby, said, “Professor Bennett’s spectacular work helped transform cosmology into an integral component in the quest for the fundamental laws of physics.

His trailblazing work gives us an unprecedented, precise view of the universe, and more importantly, reminds us of the joys and possibilities of scientific discovery.”[14] The full list of awards includes:[1] Bennett has more than 91,000 citations in Google Scholar and an h-index of 80.