spacetoday.net: Hubble begins search for New Horizons Kuiper Belt targets

Posted: Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 7:25 AM ET (1125 GMT)
New Horizons illustration (JHUAPL)

Planetary scientists will use the Hubble Space Telescope to search for an object in the Kuiper Belt that NASA's New Horizons spacecraft can visit after its flyby of Pluto next year, NASA announced this week. The mission has hoped to be able to find a object in the Kuiper Belt, the band of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune, within range of the spacecraft, but previous searches had failed to find any candidates objects within range of the spacecraft's trajectory. The observations will start with a limited portion of the sky and, if that search does detect at least two KBOs with a certain minimum brightness, the search will expand to a larger area. Any suitable KBO found in the Hubble search could be visited by New Horizons after its July 2015 flyby of Pluto and its moons.