UT Dallas’ Hoffman Quoted in Time Story on Mars
Dr. John H. Hoffman, a space scientist and physics professor at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), is quoted in the cover story in the current issue of Time magazine about President Bush’s proposal to send humans to Mars. The issue, dated Jan. 26, arrived on newsstands today.
Hoffman, a longtime member of UTD’s William B. Hanson Center for Space Sciences, is a member of a scientific team selected last August by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to undertake the first of the space agency’s “scout” missions to the planet Mars, scheduled for launch in 2007 and arrival one year later. The goal of the unmanned mission is to conduct a variety of scientific experiments from a lander that will dig a trench in the surface in an attempt to discover where the water that ran over the surface of Mars eons ago has gone.
Hoffman will receive funding of approximately $4 million to build the project’s mass spectrometer instrument system, which will study the soil and atmosphere of the Red Planet.