Press Releases

Mars Odyssey has New Project Scientist
November 20, 2002

Dr. Jeffrey Plaut has been named project scientist for NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey mission, succeeding Dr. R. Stephen Saunders who has retired. Plaut had been the deputy project scientist for Odyssey.

Plaut came to JPL in 1991 and has served on the Magellan mission to Venus and three space shuttle radar missions. He is currently the co-principal investigator on the 2003 Mars Express radar sounder and a team member on the 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter radar team.

He has a bachelor's degree from Brown University and a doctorate in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Washington University at St. Louis. He lives in Pasadena with his wife and daughter. His hometown is Bethesda-Chevy Chase, Maryland.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of Space Science in Washington, D.C. Investigators at Arizona State University in Tempe, the University of Arizona in Tucson and NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston, operate the science instruments. Additional science partners are located at the Russian Aviation and Space Agency and at Los Alamos National Laboratories, New Mexico. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL.