Michael H. Hecht

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

Hecht obtained an AB 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 began working for MIT's Haystack Observatory.[21] In 2014, the MOXIE instrument, for which Hecht is the principal investigator, was selcted as one of the instruments on the Perseverance rover for the Mars 2020 mission.[22][23] 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.[24][25]