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Speaker:  Steve Conard, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab

"New Horizons LORRI Imaging at Ultima Thule"

The New Horizons spacecraft collected data on Kuiper Belt Object 2014MU69, nicknamed Ultima Thule, during a flyby encounter in December 2018 and January 2019. Steve Conard will discuss the efforts to find Ultima Thule, to characterize it prior to the encounter, the preparations for the encounter, and the data collected by the LORRI instrument. A long-time amateur astronomer, being part of the exploration process for the most distant object visited by a spacecraft was one of the highlights of Steven's career.

Steve is a member of the Principal Professional Staff at the The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He has over 35 years’ experience building, testing, and operating optical instrumentation for astrophysics and planetary space missions. He has been lead engineer for the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on the New Horizons mission since 2003. Prior to joining APL in 2002, he was with The Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy for 20 years.

He has been an amateur astronomer since age 12, and grinding his own telescope mirrors as a teenager led him to a career in optics. His current interests in amateur astronomy are occultation timing and spectroscopy.