From The Mercury Archives: Sept. 22, 2003 UTD launches to Mars

UTDPD Blotter

UTD Professor Hoffman will participate in 2007 NASA Program

John Hoffman eagerly awaits funding to build a mass spectrometer as he and other scientists around the country prepare for the 2007 NASA unmanned Mars Scout mission.

Hoffman, a physics professor and program head, will work with a team to assemble a mass spectrometer. This machine, like others Hoffman and his co-workers have launched in previous space expeditions, will work with other devices to determine the mineral content of Mars, he said.

The main scouta mobile unit that will traverse the Martian terrain - will dig Mars debris from the top three feet of the planet’s surface and feed it into tiny ovens. As the minerals heat and evaporate, the spectrometer will determine the composition of the evaporated gas and search for traces of water, he said.

“Since water vaporizes at a relatively low temperature, the spectrometer will be able to easily detect the water vapors,” Hoffman said.

NASA’s recently initiated Mars Scout program allows scientists the unique opportunity to completely design and control the mission. According to Hoffman, principal investigators lead teams of scientists, who then build and control all of the equipment used in the mission.

Hoffman said he was selected by two of four final teams NASA evaluated last August to build the mass spectrometer. The Phoenix team, selected by NASA for the mission and based out of the University of Arizona in Tucson, asked Hoffman and his crew to design and build a mass spectrometer similar to those that Hoffman and other space scientists from UTD have sent up to the moon, Comet Halley and Venus. This mission will be the first to Mars in which UTD has participated, he said.

According to Hoffman, the spectrometer also will be used to analyze the atmospheric composition of Mars with help from the Phoenix scout.