Engineer who led Pluto camera team to speak Oct. 21
Trending
FREWSBURG – The engineer who led the team that built the camera behind the sharpest images of Pluto will visit the Martz-Kohl Observatory on Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.
Steve Conard will present “LORRI: The Camera That Showed Us Pluto,” a look at the long-range reconnaissance imager aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft.
Conard was lead engineer for LORRI from 2003 through 2024. He will follow the camera from design, construction, and testing through two decades in space. He will share its images of Jupiter, Pluto, and Arrokoth, along with the inside story of the mission.
“I had a front-row seat for the whole amazing journey, from building and testing the camera on the ground to seeing Pluto come into focus,” Conard said.
New Horizons launched in January 2006 and crossed the moon’s orbit in about nine hours. It passed within 7,800 miles of Pluto in July 2015, when LORRI’s 8.2-inch telescope revealed ice mountains, flowing nitrogen glaciers and Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, in details as small as a few hundred feet across. On New Year’s Day 2019, the spacecraft flew past Arrokoth, the most distant world ever explored up close. It is still operating today, billions of miles from home.
Conard’s career grew out of building telescopes as a teenager. After studying at the University of Arizona, he spent 42 years with Johns Hopkins University, including time at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), where he built instruments for NASA’s CONTOUR mission before joining New Horizons. His earlier work included sounding rockets, NASA’s Astro-1 and Astro-2 space shuttle missions, and the FUSE satellite. He later served as integration and test engineer for L’LORRI, a similar camera on NASA’s Lucy mission to the Jupiter Trojan asteroids.
Now retired in Wellsboro, Pa., Conard is an avid amateur astronomer and a founding member of the Pennsylvania Wilds Astronomy Club. Through asteroid occultation timing, he has discovered two asteroid moons, and asteroid 149163 Steven Conrad is named in his honor. He also co-founded Second Light Observatory Services, a nonprofit that provides free skilled labor to help college observatories with repairs.
The talk will be shown on the big screen at the observatory and presented live via Zoom. In-person attendees can join a question-and-answer session with Conard and, weather permitting, guided tours and telescope viewing afterward. Visitors should dress for the weather, as the classroom is heated but the observatory domes are not. For more information and the Zoom link, visit martzobservatory.org.
The Martz-Kohl Observatory is managed by the Marshal Martz Memorial Astronomical Association, Inc., a non-profit organization of amateur astronomers. The observatory is located at 176 Robbin Hill Rd, Frewsburg, NY 14738.