LORRI: The Camera That Showed Us Pluto

This talk will be shown on the big screen at the Martz-Kohl Observatory and presented live via Zoom. We encourage you to join us in person to watch with fellow stargazers and put your questions to Steve Conard during our lively Q&A. If the weather cooperates, the evening will end with guided tours and viewing through our telescopes. Dress for the elements: our classroom is heated, but the domes are not.

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. Its 8.2-inch telescope revealed towering ice mountains, flowing nitrogen glaciers, and Pluto’s largest moon, Charon. On New Year’s Day 2019, New Horizons flew past Arrokoth, a small, ancient Kuiper Belt object and the most distant world ever explored up close. The spacecraft is still operating today, billions of miles from home.

Steve Conard, then an optical engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), led the team that built and tested LORRI. He will follow the camera 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.

“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, from building and testing the camera on the ground to seeing Pluto come into focus,” says Conard.

Steve Conard’s career grew out of his enjoyment of telescope making as a teenager. After his undergraduate studies at the University of Arizona, he joined Johns Hopkins University in 1982 and stayed for 42 years. He began by supporting sounding rocket experiments that studied the upper atmosphere in far-ultraviolet light, then worked on NASA’s Astro-1 and Astro-2 space shuttle missions and the FUSE satellite.

In 2002 he moved to APL, the nation’s largest university-affiliated research center. There he built instruments for NASA’s CONTOUR mission before beginning his two-decade role on New Horizons. He later served as integration and test engineer for L’LORRI, a similar camera on NASA’s Lucy mission, which is surveying the Trojan asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit.

Now retired and living in Wellsboro, PA, Conard remains an avid amateur astronomer. He is a founding member of the Pennsylvania Wilds Astronomy Club and a member of the International Occultation Timing Association. Through that work he has discovered two asteroid moons, and asteroid 149163 StevenConard is named in his honor. He and several colleagues also founded Second Light Observatory Services, a nonprofit that provides free skilled labor to help college observatories with repairs. Away from the sky, he enjoys minor league baseball, craft beer, and railroading history.

As both a spaceflight engineer and a lifelong amateur astronomer, Conard offers a view of the mission few speakers can match. Join us to hear LORRI’s story from the person who led the team that built it.

Zoom Meeting

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Time: October 21, 2026 at 7:30 PM, Eastern Time

Topic: Steve Conard
Meeting ID:  874 4706 3207
Passcode: program

Click the “One Clink Link” shown below. When prompted, click “open zoom.us” in the dialog shown by your browser. If you don’t see a dialog, click the blue “Launch Meeting” in the webpage.

One Click Link: October 2026 Zoom Link

Zoom URL: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87447063207?pwd=eKjXazQANfxvAoBkt71k2CPHKPoUgL.1