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David Kusnierkiewicz, New Horizons Mission Systems Engineer, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.

In the critical role of New Horizons mission systems engineer, David Kusnierkiewicz leads the technical development of NASA's first spacecraft to Pluto, from integration of New Horizons' key systems and science instruments through to pre-launch testing.

Kusnierkiewicz is a member of the principal professional staff at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and is the chief engineer of APL's Space Department. Since joining the Lab in 1983 he has contributed to a number of NASA and Department of Defense programs, including the successful Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) mission, on which he also served as mission systems engineer.

Kusnierkiewicz holds bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has an extensive background in designing, integrating and testing power system electronics for spacecraft. He has received two NASA Group Achievement awards, has authored or co-authored 10 technical papers and serves as a guest lecturer for space-related Johns Hopkins evening college courses, where he speaks about spacecraft integration and testing.

SCIENCE BRIEFING

Dr. Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo.

Dr. Alan Stern is principal investigator of the New Horizons Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission, the largest "PI"-led mission within NASA. He also serves as principal investigator of two science instruments aboard New Horizons, the Alice ultraviolet spectrometer and Ralph visible imager/infrared spectrometer.

Dr. Stern serves as executive director of the Southwest Research Institute's (SwRI's) Space Science and Engineering Division in Boulder, Colo. He is a planetary scientist and author whose work has taken him to numerous astronomical observatories, to the South Pole, and to the upper atmosphere aboard high performance military aircraft. His research has focused on studies of the Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud, comets, the satellites of the outer planets, Pluto, and the search for evidence of solar systems around other stars. He has also worked on spacecraft rendezvous theory, terrestrial polar mesospheric clouds, galactic astrophysics, and studies of tenuous satellite atmospheres, including the atmosphere of the moon.

Among numerous projects, Dr. Stern is also the principal investigator of the Alice spectrometer for the ESA/NASA Rosetta comet orbiter, launched in 2004, and heads the LAMP instrument investigation on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission, which will launch in 2008.

Dr. Richard Binzel, New Horizons Science Team Co-Investigator, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

Dr. Richard Binzel is professor of planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a co-investigator on the New Horizons mission. His main area of expertise is the mapping of Pluto's surface. He is especially interested mapping the extent of Pluto's polar ice caps to determine the types of seasons that Pluto has.

Dr. Binzel received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Texas in 1986 and has been on the faculty of MIT for 18 years. Using Earth-based telescopes in 1985, he detected the first "eclipses" between Pluto and Charon, confirming the moon's existence. He is a former press officer and a past chair of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Science.

Dr. William McKinnon, New Horizons Science Team Co-Investigator, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri

Dr. McKinnon is a member of the science team of NASA's New Horizons Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission. His responsibilities during the mission include interpreting the geology and geophysics of Pluto and Charon, and using these and other data to better understand the origin and evolution of these and other worlds of the Kuiper Belt. He is especially interested in the analogy between the Earth-Moon and Pluto-Charon systems.

Dr. McKinnon is a professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and a member of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in Saint Louis. He received his undergraduate degree from MIT and his doctorate from Caltech. Dr. McKinnon is currently a principal investigator for NASA's Planetary Geology and Geophysics and Outer Planets Research programs. He recently stepped down as chair of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society.

Dr. McKinnon's recent work has focused on mountain formation on Jupiter's volcanic moon Io, the chemistry of Europa's ocean and its astrobiological potential, convection inside icy satellites, and the internal evolution of Kuiper Belt objects large and small.

Dr. Dale Cruikshank, New Horizons Science Team Co-Investigator, NASA Ames Research Center, Sunnyvale, Calif.

Dr. Dale Cruikshank is a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center (Moffett Field, Calif.). His principal research interests concern the icy bodies of the outer solar system, including the satellites of the giant planets, comets, and bodies in the region beyond Neptune - most certainly including Pluto and its moons. He studies these objects by infrared spectroscopy and radiometry, using telescopes on Earth and in space, and the Cassini spacecraft at the Saturn system. Dr. Cruikshank is the co-discoverer of the various ices identified on Pluto's surface.

Dr. Cruikshank received his doctorate at the University of Arizona in 1968. He was an astronomer and faculty member at the University of Hawaii from 1970 through 1987, and has been at NASA since that time. He participated in the Voyager missions to the outer solar system and is an interdisciplinary scientist on the Spitzer Space Telescope and a science team member on the Cassini mission. He has participated as a member and as the chair in several NASA and National Research Council committees and panels.

Dr. Fran Bagenal, New Horizons Science Team Co-Investigator, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, Colo.

Dr. Fran Bagenal is professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is a co-investigator on the New Horizons mission. Her main area of expertise is the study of charged particles trapped in planetary magnetic fields. She is interested in finding out if the solar wind interaction with Pluto's escaping atmosphere acts like a comet.

Dr. Bagenal received her doctorate degree from MIT in 1981 and spent five years as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College, London, before returning to the United States for research and faculty positions in Boulder, Colo.

She has participated in many of NASA's planetary exploration missions, including the Voyager mission to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. She was on the science teams of the Galileo and Deep Space 1 missions and looks forward to participating in the recently-selected Juno mission to Jupiter. Dr. Bagenal chairs NASA's Outer Planet Assessment Group that provides input from the scientific community on exploration of the outer solar system.

PAYLOAD BRIEFING (PART 1)

Dr. Hal Weaver, New Horizons Project Scientist, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.

Dr. Hal Weaver is the New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., where he joined the staff in May 2002. The mission may have nearly a decade to go before reaching Pluto, but Weaver has already made a great discovery near the distant planet – he was co-leader of the team that used the Hubble Space Telescope this year to find two new moons in the Pluto system!

Dr. Weaver has been pursuing space-borne, rocket-borne, airborne and ground-based investigations in planetary science since 1978. To earn his doctorate (from Johns Hopkins in 1982) he analyzed cometary spectra obtained with the NASA/ESA International Ultraviolet Observer satellite - the first systematic investigation of a comet's ultraviolet emissions, which demonstrated that water was probably the dominant volatile constituent in cometary nuclei.

Dr. Weaver has led many investigations of comets, including the first Hubble Telescope spectroscopic observations of a comet in September 1991, and the Hubble program to study Comet D/Shoemaker-Levy 9's plunge into Jupiter's atmosphere in July 1994. He also led Hubble investigations of comets Hyakutake, Hale-Bopp, C/1999 S4 (LINEAR) and several others, and last year guided the team that first detected atomic deuterium emission in a comet – which may shed light on the role comets played in seeding Earth with water and organic molecules.

In 1996, asteroid 1984 FN was renamed asteroid "Halweaver" to recognize his work on the chemical composition of comets. Weaver has also published more than 100 papers, including studies of planets and their satellites in addition to comets, and has a longstanding interest in research on the formation and evolution of planetary systems.

Dr. Dennis Reuter, Ralph Instrument Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Dr. Dennis Reuter is the instrument scientist for the Ralph spectral camera on the New Horizons Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission. He is also a science team member and a team leader of the group that provided the LEISA (Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array) infrared imager to Ralph.

Dr. Reuter is a member of the Planetary Systems Laboratory in the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He is a planetary scientist and laboratory spectroscopist whose astronomical research has focused on studies of the atmospheres of planets and comets. His laboratory work concentrates on the spectral line shapes of molecules of astronomical interest.

He is also a principle investigator on the hyperspectral LEISA/Atmospheric Corrector (LAC) flying on EO-1, the first New Millennium Earth Observing Spacecraft launched in November 2000.

Dr. Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo.

See bio under "Science Briefing."

Dr. Leonard Tyler, REX Instrument Principal Investigator, Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif.

Dr. Leonard Tyler is a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. He's an expert in the areas of radio science, planetary exploration, remote sensing, applied electromagnetics, and signal processing.

He is principal investigator for the Mars Global Surveyor Radio Science team. Some of his other projects include uplink radio science development, ultra-low power computing, scattering from planetary surfaces, occultation methods for planetary atmospheres, and GPS occultation for Earth's atmosphere.

He received his B.E.E. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 scientific and technical papers, reports, and chapters in specialized volumes.

Dr. Tyler is a member of DPS/AAS, AGU, IAU, IEEE, URSI, the Electromagnetics Society, and is a fellow of IEEE. He has received several awards including NASA's medals for Public Service and for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.

PAYLOAD BRIEFING (PART 2)

Andy Cheng, LORRI Instrument Principal Investigator, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.

Dr. Cheng is principal investigator for the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), the "eagle eyes" on the New Horizons spacecraft that will take detailed, high-resolution images of Pluto and its moons.

A supervisor for theoretical space physics at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., he was responsible for the overall integrity of science returns from the historic Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission at asteroid 433 Eros and the lead for science data analysis and archiving, science planning and conflict resolution among NEAR science requirements.

Dr. Cheng was an interdisciplinary scientist for the Galileo mission, investigating magnetospheric physics at Jupiter, and is a Cassini co-investigator, serving as a member of the Magnetospheric Imaging team on the Cassini mission to Saturn and Titan. He also serves on the science team of the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission.

Dr. Cheng was named Maryland Academy of Sciences Outstanding Young Scientist in 1985 and has received five NASA Group Achievement awards since then. He has authored more than 120 scientific articles. He holds a B.S. in physics from Princeton University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University.

Dr. Dave McComas, SWAP Instrument Principal Investigator, Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX

Dr. Dave McComas is the senior executive director of the Space Science and Engineering Division at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.

Dr. McComas is the principal investigator for NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) Mission, Ulysses Solar Wind Observations Over the Poles of the Sun (SWOOPS) Experiment, and the Two Wide-Angle Imaging Neutral-Atom Spectrometers (TWINS) Explorer Mission-of-Opportunity. He is the lead co-investigator for the Solar Wind Electron Proton Alpha Monitor (SWEPAM) instrument on the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) and the solar wind analyzer for the New Horizons mission to Pluto (SWAP).

Prior to moving to Southwest, he was the principal investigator for the Department of Energy's series of 10 Magnetospheric Plasma Analyzer (MPA) instruments at geosynchronous orbit. Dr. McComas is co-investigator on NASA's Medium Energy Neutral Atom (MENA) instrument on the IMAGE Midsized Explorer, the plasma instrument for the Cassini mission to Saturn (CAPS), the GENESIS Discovery mission, ISTP Polar spacecraft's Thermal Ion Dynamics Experiment (TIDE), and the Cluster plasma electron instrument (PEACE). He is also a team member on the New Millennium Plasma Experiment for Planetary Exploration (PEPE).

Dr. McComas is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and a recipient of the AGU's 1993 James B. Macelwane Award. He has invented a variety of instruments and missions for space applications, holds six patents. He has also authored more than 300 scientific papers in the refereed literature and 50 other publications covering a wide range of research across space physics including coronal, solar wind, heliospheric, magnetospheric, cometary and planetary topics, as well as numerous space flight instruments and techniques.

Dr. Ralph McNutt, PEPPSI Instrument Principal Investigator, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.

Dr. Ralph McNutt is principal investigator of the New Horizons Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI) instrument, which will search for neutral atoms that escape Pluto's atmosphere and become charged by their interaction with the solar wind.

Dr. McNutt joined the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Md., in 1992. He has been involved in a broad range of space physics research and is a pioneer in solar neutrino research.

Dr. McNutt also serves as project scientist for the MErcury Surface. Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission, which launched in summer 2004 and is set to conduct the first study of Mercury from orbit.

Tiffany Finley, Student Dust Counter Project Manager, University of Colorado, Boulder

Tiffany Finley was the project manager for the Student Dust Counter instrument while she completed her M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Prior to her graduate studies, she had worked Bluefin Robotics in Cambridge, Mass., creating software for the autonomous underwater vehicle, and as a guidance and control engineer at Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space. Her B.S. is also in Aerospace from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently an applications engineer at Analytical Graphics in Exton, Penn.

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