Full Resolution I came into the Geology room just as the ROTCOVER_364B observations came down and Tod started processing them. Tod became (by a few seconds) the first to see Arrokoth's resolved shape. I could tell he was 'in the zone,' so I hit record. He's drumming along to Steely Dan's "FM," while running his FORTRAN-based imaging code which has needed only minimal upgrades since first developed in on a PDP-11/70.
Tod Lauer: "You know, I never in a million years thought that my career would take me to that place of 'on-demand image processing.' I was really happy to sit in my office and take my time to optimize my algorithms and really develop a great framework for image processing. And here we were -- there's like 30 of us in the room, everyone's shouting, and -- bam, the images are down, and it's a race to process them. I could never do that before -- I could never zone out in the chaos surrounding me like that. I had to really train myself to listen to music to tune it all out."
