Museum members and guests were treated to a VERY special talk at the museum on March 20. Alice Bowman, the Mission Operations Manager (“MOM”) for the New Horizons mission, shared her insights on the recent fly-by mission to capture images and other data of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt Object, Arrokoth (formerly know as Ultima Thule). In short, Alice and her team at the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory are skilled engineers to have managed to capture images of an object just 21 miles long that is 4 billion miles away. For example, it takes over 6 hours for light (and telemetry) to reach the spacecraft from Earth at those distances.
Alice was also gracious enough to spend time with middle school and high school students from some Lockport and Depew schools. Some of the students were finalists in a competition to send an experiment to the International Space Station and others received awards for their mission patch designs. The students were engaged and asked meaningful questions. With kids like these, our science and engineering future looks bright!
See more photos below.
We thank Alice for spending time with us and we thank the Niagara Frontier section of the AIAA!
The Pluto Salute!
Board President Walter Gordon introduces Alice
Explaining how the team had one chance to get data from the occultation event
Alice answers questions from the attendees
A photo op with some fans
Alice with the students