Bemus Point|Local Event
Observatory Lecture: LORRI: The Camera That Showed Us Pluto
đź” LORRI: The Camera That Showed Us Pluto
A talk by Steve Conard, lead engineer of the New Horizons camera
🗓 Wednesday, October 21 · 7:30 PM Eastern
đź“Ť Martz-Kohl Observatory, 176 Robbin Hill Rd., Frewsburg, NY
👉 More info and Zoom link: martzobservatory.org
When New Horizons flew past Pluto in 2015, the world was stunned by a distant, icy world with a giant heart-shaped glacier across its face. Many of the sharpest views came from LORRI, the spacecraft's telescopic camera. Steve Conard, then an optical engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, led the team that built and tested it. Now you can hear LORRI's story directly from him.
New Horizons left Earth in January 2006 faster than any spacecraft before it, crossing the Moon's orbit in about nine hours. After a boost from Jupiter in 2007, it coasted nearly nine and a half years to Pluto, passing just 7,800 miles above the surface. LORRI's 8.2-inch telescope revealed details a few hundred feet across, including towering ice mountains, flowing nitrogen glaciers, and Pluto's largest moon, Charon. In 2019 the spacecraft flew past Arrokoth, the most distant world ever explored up close, and it is still operating today, billions of miles from home.
Steve will follow LORRI from design, construction, and testing through two decades in space, sharing its images from Jupiter, Pluto, and Arrokoth along with the inside story of the mission. He was LORRI's lead engineer from 2003 through 2024, and as a lifelong amateur astronomer he offers a view of the mission few speakers can match. He has discovered two asteroid moons, and asteroid 149163 Stevenconard is named in his honor.
We warmly encourage you to join us in person. Watch on the big screen and put your own questions to Steve during our always-lively Q&A. If the weather cooperates, the evening will end with guided tours and viewing through our telescopes. Please dress for the elements: our classroom is heated, but the observatory domes are not.
Can't make it in person? The talk is also live on Zoom.