Michael H. Hecht is a research scientist, associate director for research management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory,^[1] and former deputy project director of the Event Horizon Telescope.^[2] He served as lead scientist for the Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer instrument on the Phoenix Mars lander,^[3] and as principal investigator for the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE) instrument on the Mars 2020 rover.^[4]

Career

Hecht obtained an A.B. in Physics from Princeton University, an MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1982.^[5]

Hecht joined the staff of California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1982,^[6] where he researched microelectromechanical systems, surface and interface science, scientific instrument development, and planetary science.^[5] He co-invented the Ballistic Electron Emission Microscopy system^[7] and published several highly-cited papers on metal-semiconductor interfaces,^[8][9] for which he received the newly-renamed Lew Allen Award for Excellence in 1990.^[6][10] At JPL, as the supervisor of the Microdevices Laboratory's In-Situ Exploration Technology Group,^[11] he developed the concept for the Deep Space 2 micro-landers, which flew to Mars in 1999.^[12] He was later named the project manager, co-investigator, and project scientist for the Mars Environmental Compatibility Assessment (MECA) instrument for the cancelled Mars Surveyor 2001 mission.^[5][13] The MECA instrument was later flown as the Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer on the Phoenix mission to Mars in 2007,^[14] with Hecht as lead scientist and co-investigator, and was instrumental in the discovery of perchlorate in Martian soil.^[15][16] Based on that work, Hecht published highly-cited papers on the chemistry of Martian soil and the existence of water on Mars.^{[17][18][19][20]}

After almost 30 years at JPL, Hecht was appointed as an associate director of MIT's Haystack Observatory.^[21] In 2014, the MOXIE instrument, for which Hecht is the principal investigator, was selected as one of the instruments on the Perseverance rover for the Mars 2020 mission.^[22][23][24] In 2019, Hecht was one of the scientists awarded the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for his work with the Event Horizon Telescope to produce the first image of a supermassive black hole.^[25][26]

References