... Strohbehn, 64, of Ellicott City, Maryland, died Jan. 14 after a battle with bone cancer.
His daughter, Maria Strohbehn, of New York City, told The Baltimore Sun that her father, as a child, had been a big fan of “The Outer Limits,” a 1960s television series about science fiction. She said that show helped formulate his decisions about his future life’s work.
After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in Council Bluffs, Strohbehn was accepted at both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University but chose instead to enroll at Iowa State University in Ames, where his parents both had attended college.
He received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1976 from Iowa State, his masters in electrical engineering, again from Iowa State, in 1977 and his doctorate in 1979 — again in electrical engineering.
He was recruited out of graduate school by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and joined the staff in June 1979, spending his entire working career there.
Strohbehn’s brother, Jody, a longtime Council Bluffs veterinarian, said his brother’s initial work at the APL was largely defense oriented. As defense contracts declined, his work turned more toward working with NASA and the space exploration program.
Strohbehn worked on the Hubble Space Telescope program before moving on to the CRISM mission to Mars as one of the lead engineers for instrument design. He was also involved in Messenger — a NASA mission to Mercury — instrumentation; Contour, a NASA mission to study comets; and many research and development projects for advanced detectors and the miniaturization of electronics.
In addition to his work at APL, he was a research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering.
Along the way, his accomplishments included 66 major patents and publications. He also co-authored an engineering college text.
At the time of his death, Strohbehn was involved in NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission, having designed the detector electronics for this mission that will fly to one of Jupiter’s largest moons, Europa, to photograph and characterize its icy surface and investigate its habitability.
A longtime friend, Paul W. Howey, founder and semi-retired president of Microwave Telemetry Inc. of Columbia, Maryland, told The Sun that Strohbehn was “academically brilliant.”
“He was so brilliant that he could figure out very complicated physics problems,” he told the newspaper.
Andrew A. Mastandrea, supervisor of APL’s Space Science Instrumentation Group where Strohbehn worked, noted in a comment to The Sun that he often paired Strohbehn with young engineers.
“He was open and loved to share his work and loved to teach,” Mastandrea said.
Away from the laboratory, his daughter said her father enjoyed reading and listening to music.
“He loved classic rock ‘n’ roll from the 1960s and 1970s, and was a huge Grateful Dead fan. He was a big Deadhead,” Maria Strohbehn said. “He also liked classical music — especially Debussy.”
Jody Strohbehn said many of his brother’s colleagues commented on his patience, his willingness to check and recheck — then check again — the work he was doing to be certain it was correct.
“Kim liked space and exploring it, and he was good at it,” he said.
