Temoc

Students, faculty, staff, and alumni began discussion of eliminating the Temoc character (while keeping the Comets as the student body nickname) in the 2007-2008 academic year.[17] An initial poll was sent out and early write-in options included an astronaut, robot, greyhound, and a “Crusher” character. Soon after, the university had begun promoting April 3, 2008 as "Temoc's Final Birthday". In the end, the final poll gave 4 options: a fox, hawk, coyote, or a comet character.[18][19] "Comet character" won the majority with 50% of the vote, so Temoc continued to remain as the UTD mascot.[17][20][21]

In 2009, the Student Government started another campaign to replace mascot. An initial poll concluded that over 70% of students wanted choose a new mascot, which became a clear indication of Temoc's unpopularity.[22]

At the end of a lengthy exploratory research, a final poll created by a special council was given to the student body. Students were given the option to vote to keep Temoc or to change the mascot to a man in a spacesuit. Temoc won the poll by a landslide.[23] However, Temoc's win was mainly attributed to confusion based the spaceman's poor illustration - not the desire to keep the original mascot around.

Over the past decade, Temoc has exploded in popularity with the UTD student body. The figure has become an icon of UTD and has integrated into the culture of the university.

Temoc is "comet" spelled backwards. While the UT Dallas student body had been collectively referred to as the "Comets" well before the mascot's official creation in 1998, Temoc officially solidified the college's association with the astronomical symbol.

The name "Temoc" was created and chosen by UTD's 2002 Student Body Government. The group had hastily compromised on writing the mascot's new name as "comet" backwards because they were under pressure to quickly come up with an alternative name to replace the original (Blaze) on a short notice (due to a legal warning from UT Arlington).[5]

This decision was regarded as incredibly uncreative - a consequence largely attributed by the fact that the majority of the student population was majoring in a STEM area (as opposed to the arts) at the time. As a result, the student body now often refers to various points of interest on campus by their backwards spelling. Essentially, making fun at Temoc's ridiculous name is the sole reason why UT Dallas students still utilize backwards names to this day.

Enarc is "crane" spelled backwards. It refers to any construction crane that resides on the main campus. Because UT Dallas has been in a period of rapid growth and development in the past decade, cranes have become an iconic moving landmark on campus.[24]

Tobor is "robot" spelled backwards. It refers to the automated food delivery robots that roam the sidewalks of the UTD campus.[25][26] The robots are managed by Starship Technologies.

Since its founding, astrophysics and space research has played a key role in UT Dallas' early research prowess and is intertwined with many of the college's traditions.[34][35] Several UTD faculty members and alumni's groundbreaking contributions to space science helped develop the university's current space-themed school spirit.

• Dr. James L. Carter was one of the UT Dallas geoscientists that trained Apollo astronauts to spot interesting geology on the moon and also analyzed the lunar samples that came back. He created lunar regolith simulant (aka fake "moon dirt"), which is so chemically, mineralogically, and textually similar to the real thing that the two are practically indistinguishable. NASA has ordered over 50 tons of the material to use for testing space equipment and other research projects. All UTD class rings are surrounded by the same lunar regolith simulant material the night before the official Ring Ceremony to symbolize the university's past and future.
• Dr. James Reilly was the first UT Dallas alumni to become an astronaut for NASA. He has spent a combined 853 hours in space, including five spacewalks lasting more than 31 hours during which he helped assemble the International Space Station. Upon returning from his final mission, Reilly presented UTD a framed collage commemorating the flight along with a UT Dallas flag that made the trip to space. The gifts are currently displayed on the 4th floor of UT Dallas' Eugene McDermott Library.[36]
• Dr. John Hoffman designed and built mass spectrometers and other equipment to explore Venus, the moon, and Halley's Comet and played a key role in discovering the existence of water on Mars.
• Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner joined the institution that would become UTD in 1961 and became well renowned in the scientific community for his studies of the Earth's ionosphere and magnetosphere. In 1966, NASA gave Berkner its highest civilian award, the Public Service Medal, for his contributions to U.S. space programs.
• Dr. Francis S. Johnson, an expert on the Earth's upper atmosphere, designed atmospheric pressure testing devices that flew on Apollo flights 12, 14, and 15 to detect the existence of a lunar atmosphere in for the first manned lunar landings.
• Dr. Michael Kesden and Nobel Laureate Dr. Russell Hulse both directly contributed to the first discovery and detection of gravitational waves (ripples in the fabric of space and time).
• Dr. John H.L. Hansen and a team of UTD researchers digitized thousands of hours of audio from the Apollo missions. The historical audio data was preserved from NASA's original 1960s single-track audio playback machine (SoundScriber) that used multiple boxes of 1-inch tapes. Without these efforts, most of the documented communications from the world's first space missions would have been lost to time.