Kurt Retherford
Dr. Kurt Retherford is a Southwest Research Institute scientist and principal investigator of the Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) instruments aboard ESA’s JUICE and NASA’s Europa Clipper missions.
In November 2025 he led the coordinated dual-spacecraft UVS observation of interstellar comet 3i-atlas, obtaining the first simultaneous two-direction views of a comet’s coma and detecting hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon emissions extending ~5 million km from the nucleus (src-3i-atlas-dual-spacecraft-imaging-2026-05).