LORRI: The Camera That Showed Us Pluto

In this talk, retired Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory optical engineer Steve Conard tells the story of LORRI, the telescopic camera aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, from its design and testing to the images that transformed Pluto from a point of light into a world. His presentation, “LORRI: The Camera That Showed Us Pluto,” follows the instrument through 20 years in space, with an engineer’s view of a mission he helped build. As he puts it, he is “an engineer, not a scientist,” and he keeps the focus on how the camera was made and what it saw.

Conard begins on the ground with the design problem: an 8-inch telescope with the resolution to map Pluto’s far side days before the spacecraft arrived, sized to fit inside the spacecraft, with no focus mechanism and no way to repair it. His team’s answer was silicon carbide, a material that conducts heat well and barely expands or contracts, so the mirrors and structure change together and the focus holds. LORRI runs cold, insulated and radiating to space, inside a spacecraft kept near room temperature. He walks through the clean-room work in layered gloves, the vibration and thermal-vacuum testing, and the calibration that lets scientists turn photons counted at Pluto into real measurements.

Launched in January 2006, New Horizons passed Jupiter in February 2007, and LORRI imaged the Great Red Spot, lightning, aurora, and a volcanic plume rising above Io. Eight years later the camera delivered Pluto: the heart-shaped glacier, flowing nitrogen ice, mountains, and the largest moon Charon. At Pluto’s distance, radio signals take about nine hours for a round trip at the speed of light, so a command could not be corrected in real time and every observation had to be scripted in advance. Conard describes seeing the first images almost as soon as the scientists did. He then follows LORRI to Arrokoth, which it revealed on New Year’s Day 2019 as a “contact binary” of two bodies stuck together, and closes with LORRI’s possible future: a spacecraft still sending images from the Kuiper Belt, with dwindling power setting how much longer it can phone home.

Steve Conard began his career at Johns Hopkins University in 1982, after studying at the University of Arizona, and stayed 42 years. He worked on sounding rocket experiments and the Astro-1, Astro-2, and FUSE missions before joining APL in 2002. He was lead engineer for LORRI from 2003 through 2024 and later helped build L’LORRI, a similar camera on NASA’s Lucy mission. Now retired in Wellsboro, PA, he is a founding member of the Pennsylvania Wilds Astronomy Club and a member of the International Occultation Timing Association, and asteroid 149163 StevenConard is named in his honor. “I was fortunate enough to be the lead engineer for LORRI from 2003 through 2024, so I had a front-row seat for the whole amazing journey,” he says

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