Hall Fellow Carly Howett appointed lead on a NASA mission

Professor Carly Howett, Tutorial Fellow in Physics at St Edmund Hall, was recently appointed the lead of the instrument Ralph on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft.

The instrument is made up of two parts: MVIC (Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera) and LEISA (Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array). MVIC is a colour camera, and LEISA is an infrared spectrometer. MVIC was the camera that produced the first colour images of Pluto and another Kuiper Belt object (KBO) known as Arrokoth. Whereas LEISA tells us about the composition of these worlds, by looking for the chemical fingerprints of the data.

Carly writes: “I will be in charge of organising upcoming observations (this will mainly be look backs into the inner solar system, starting with Uranus and Neptune). I also lead the archiving of all the data taken into the Planetary Data System (PDS) so there is a high-quality permanent accessible record of the data taken. The best bit for me is the data analysis though, looking at the data as it comes down to understand what it is telling us about our solar system.”