Michael Hecht
Associate Director I am the principal investigator of the MOXIE experiment on NASA’s Perseverance Rover, and I’m also involved with the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.Trained as an experimental scientist, I constantly seek to combine my expertise in development of instrumentation with the scientific explorations that use that instrumentation. In addition to my role as Associate Director of Research Management at Haystack, I lead the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE) on board the NASA Perseverance Mars rover, and I am on the Event Horizon Telescope team that images supermassive black holes from Earth. It’s hard to imagine two more different space enterprises!
As Principal Investigator for the MOXIE payload on NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover (Perseverance) mission, my job is to lead the MOXIE Science Team through operations on Mars, analysis of data from the mission and from our models in the laboratory at Haystack, and communication of the important findings to the scientific community and to the public. MOXIE’s job is to demonstrate that we can reliably convert carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars, and to learn all we can about how to extend that design to a full-scale system that will someday provide liquid oxygen for a rocket that will lift our astronauts off the surface of Mars to rendezvous with their ride home.
In my spare time I like to hike, bicycle, and play klezmer music on the clarinet.
MOXIE: Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment
Demonstrating conversion of atmospheric CO2 to oxygen on the Martian surface.
AERO-VISTA CubeSat mission
A NASA twin CubeSat mission for auroral radio science and space interferometry technology.
Event Horizon Telescope
The Event Horizon Telescope is obtaining images of nearby supermassive black holes with ultra-high angular resolution to see down to the scale of the event horizon.