Marc Buie

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."

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.

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.

Buie grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and received his B.Sc. in physics from Louisiana State University in 1980. He then switched fields and earned his Ph.D. in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona in 1984. Buie was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Hawaii from 1985 to 1988. From 1988 to 1991, he worked at the Space Telescope Science Institute where he played a key role in the planning and scheduling of the first planetary observations ever made by the Hubble Space Telescope. Buie joined the staff at Lowell Observatory in 1991.

Marc William Buie (/ˈ b uː i / ; born 1958) 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.