Buried in Professor Hap McSween's résumé is this small item: namesake for an asteroid.
Yet, given the sort of fabulous research and discovery, on Earth and elsewhere, that figures into the academic landscape of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, such a border note for one of its professors seems hardly surprising.
This is a department of near constant exploration on all academic levels, long-established, with credentials that include worldwide academic affiliations and investigations from the platonics of the Cumberlands to the geochemistry of paleo–lake basins on the surface of Mars.
Dr. McSween began participating in NASA spacecraft missions in 1997 as a member of the science team for Mars Pathfinder, and later for the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter. He currently serves as a co-investigator of several interplanetary projects: the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which is mapping the mineralogy of the Martian surface from orbit; the Mars Exploration Rovers that have been operating on the Martian surface since early 2004; and the Dawn asteroid orbiter, scheduled for launch towards 4 Vesta in September 2007.
There's a magnetism in the work here, an intellectual urgency to know more about our world and our cosmos, the same sort of fascination that led Dr. McSween to the discovery of Martian meteorites on Earth and into his present-day collaborations with NASA.
"Working with Hap McSween, who is a well-established name in the fields of meteoritics and cosmochemistry, gives us, his students, the opportunity to participate in cutting-edge research. The department's involvement with Mars Exploration Rovers lets us be among the first people to see images and information coming back from space. My own research pertains to an upcoming mission to the asteroid belt, DAWN.
Coming to UT for graduate work has been crucial in the opportunities that have opened up for me."
Rhiannon Mayne
Graduate Student
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
