MONTHLY MEETING: Monday, January 20th, 7:30 p.m., Classroom B, 3rd floor, Center
on Church, Downtown Roanoke. For our monthly meeting, the RVAS is pleased to welcome
back Steve Conard as our special guest speaker. An optical systems engineer for
the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland,
Steve led the team that built and tested the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI)
instrument aboard the New Horizons spacecraft that visited Pluto in July 2015. More
recently, the craft has been traversing the Kuiper Belt. Steve will discuss its
encounter with Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth, as well as a new LORRI being built for
the Lucy mission to Jupiter’s Trojan Asteroids. (See elsewhere in this issue for
more details.) Steve is always informative and entertaining, so be sure to join
us for his talk and our other January meeting activities!
