page_title: Marc Buie
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Marc Buie / Career
caption_attribution_description: Español: Marc Buie en Comodoro Rivadavia, provincia de Chubut, Argentina. Previo a la observación del objeto MU69, con su mano, indica la cantidad de telescopios (cinco) que se utilizaran en la observación. English: Marc Buie, New Horizons occultation campaign lead, holds up five fingers to represent the number of mobile telescopes in Argentina initially thought to have detected the fleeting shadow of 2014 MU69. The New Horizons spacecraft will fly by the ancient Kuiper Belt object on Jan. 1, 2019.
context_page_description: Marc William Buie is an American astronomer and prolific discoverer of minor planets who works at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado in the Space Science Department. Formerly he worked at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and was the Sentinel Space Telescope Mission Scientist for the B612 Foundation, which is dedicated to protecting Earth from asteroid impact events.
context_section_description: Since 1983, Pluto has been a central theme of research done by Buie, who has published over 85 scientific papers and journal articles. His first result was to prove that the methane visible on Pluto was on its surface and not part of its atmosphere. Since then he has worked on albedo maps of the surface, composition maps of Pluto and Charon, refinement of the orbits of Charon in addition to the much more recently discovered satellites, measurements of the structure of the atmosphere, and other measurements of the properties of the surfaces of Pluto and Charon—just to name a few. He is also one of the co-discoverers of Pluto's moons, Nix and Hydra.
  He has been working with the Deep Ecliptic Survey team who have been responsible for the discovery of over 1,000 Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). Beyond the work of just locating these objects, he additionally seeks to develop a better picture of the structure and nature of them. A spin-off project from this endeavor was his participation in the project to locate a Kuiper belt object that was within the range of NASA's New Horizons mission after it passed by Pluto. This search led to the discovery of over 50 new KBOs, including 486958 Arrokoth, the object that New Horizons would eventually perform a close fly-by of on January 1, 2019. In the lead up to the fly-by, Buie also led a successful occultation campaign in Argentina and South Africa to observe Arrokoth as it passed in front of a distant star to refine the estimates of its size, shape, and orbit. Jim Green, NASA's director of planetary science at the time, called the effort "the most historic occultation on the face of the Earth."
  In addition to his research into all aspects of Pluto and the Kuiper belt, Buie also works on studying transitional objects like 2060 Chiron and 5145 Pholus and occasionally comets, such as the recent Deep impact mission that went to Comet Tempel 1. In an effort closer to home, he also studies near-Earth asteroids to try to understand more about these potentially dangerous solar system neighbors. Most of these research efforts involve the use of Lowell Observatory telescopes in addition to occasional use of the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes. He is also active in the development of state-of-the-art astronomical instrumentation having just completed the construction of an infrared imaging spectrograph, Mimir, in collaboration with Dan Clemens of Boston University.
  Buie is a member of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and its Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS), the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the International Astronomical Union (IAU), and the International Dark-Sky Association.
  The inner main-belt asteroid 7553 Buie was named in the astronomer's honor on 28 July 1999 (M.P.C. 35486). He is also profiled as part of an article on Pluto in Air & Space Smithsonian magazine.
caption: Buie in July 2017 leading the occultation campaign to observe 486958 Arrokoth before the New Horizons fly-by of the Kuiper belt object in January 2019.
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