NASA has announced finding several Kuiper Belt Objects that may be targeted by the New Horizons spacecraft, following its flyby of the Pluto system in July 2015.
Peering into the dim, outer reaches of our Solar System, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered three Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) that the agency's New Horizons spacecraft could potentially visit after it flies by Pluto in July 2015. The KBOs were detected by a search team who were awarded telescope time for this purpose, following a committee recommendation earlier this year. "This has been a very challenging search, and it's great that in the end Hubble could accomplish a detection — one NASA mission helping another," said Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission. The Kuiper Belt is a vast rim of primordial debris encircling our Solar System. KBOs belong to a unique class of Solar System objects that has never been visited by spacecraft and which contain clues to the origin of our Solar System. The KBOs that Hubble found are each about 10 times larger than typical comets, but only about 1-2 percent of
the size of Pluto. Unlike asteroids, KBOs have not been heated by the Sun, and are thought to represent a pristine, well preserved, deep-freeze sample of what the outer Solar System was like following its birth 4.6 billion years ago. The KBOs found in the Hubble data are thought to be the building blocks of dwarf planets such as Pluto. The New Horizons team started to look for suitable KBOs in 2011 using some of the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth. They found several dozen KBOs, but none were reachable within the fuel supply available aboard the New Horizons spacecraft. "We started to get worried that we could not find anything suitable – even with Hubble – but in the end, the space telescope came to the rescue," said team member John Spencer of SwRI. "There was a huge sigh of relief when we found suitable KBOs; we are 'over the moon' about this detection." Source: Article
the size of Pluto. Unlike asteroids, KBOs have not been heated by the Sun, and are thought to represent a pristine, well preserved, deep-freeze sample of what the outer Solar System was like following its birth 4.6 billion years ago. The KBOs found in the Hubble data are thought to be the building blocks of dwarf planets such as Pluto. The New Horizons team started to look for suitable KBOs in 2011 using some of the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth. They found several dozen KBOs, but none were reachable within the fuel supply available aboard the New Horizons spacecraft. "We started to get worried that we could not find anything suitable – even with Hubble – but in the end, the space telescope came to the rescue," said team member John Spencer of SwRI. "There was a huge sigh of relief when we found suitable KBOs; we are 'over the moon' about this detection." Source: Article
