Dr. Alex Harrison Parker

Research scientist in planetary astronomy at the Southwest Research Institute, supporting NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto, and developing the post-Pluto mission into the Kuiper Belt. Expert in the dynamics of binary minor planets, detection and characterization of trans-Neptunian objects, and the origin of the architecture of our Solar System.

Search and Discovery of Arrokoth

If New Horizons was to visit any worlds beyond Pluto, they would have to be searched for in the years after the mission left Earth. The challenge of finding a tiny, faint Kuiper Belt Object target for the mission was compounded by the location where targetable objects resided in the sky: directly in line with the core of our galaxy, in some of the most crowded star fields in the sky.

Site content copyright Alex H. Parker, 2009-2021.