Shortly after its July 15, 2015 flyby of Pluto, NASA approved Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) 486958 Arrokoth as a secondary target for the New Horizons spacecraft. This KBO was not discovered until eight years after the spacecraft was launched, and it was the first object to be targeted for a flyby after the exploration spacecraft had already been launched. This talk will explore the development of the New Horizons mission, the spacecraft and it’s instruments, preparations for the January 1, 2019 Arrokoth encounter, and the results of the flyby. As the New Horizons spacecraft retains significant scientific capacity and approaches the farthest reaches of the outer solar system, potential future work for this spacecraft will also be explored.

Dr. Carey Lisse is a planetary astronomer, stellar astrophysicist, and infrared spectroscopist at The Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory. He studies the formation and evolution of solar systems, including our own, from their beginnings through the formation of life. With backgrounds in chemistry, physics, and biology, he does this mainly through studying the clues left behind during their growth – the comets, asteroids, KBOs, gas, and dust left orbiting around stars as they age. The work for which he is best known is manifold, and includes the Nobel prize winning Cosmic Background Explorer Mission that characterized the radiation from the Big Bang; the 1996 discovery of X-ray emissions from Comet Hyakutake and Carbon star LSF1 in 2001; the Comet ISON and Comet Siding Springs Observing Campaigns; exosystem detections of terrestrial planet formation in the HD 113766 star system; a giant planetary impact in the HD 172555 system and a Late Heavy Bombardment in the Eta Corvi system; observations of interstellar objects 1I/Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov; and member of the New Horizons Pluto/MU69 flyby science team studying how Kuiper Belt objects formed in the infant solar system. Dr. Lisse hold MS and PhD degrees in Physics from University of Maryland at College Park.