[meteorite-list] New Horizons Team Launches Search for Post-Pluto Flyby Prospects

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2011 11:26:18 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201104201826.p3KIQJiZ003399_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20110420.php

Wanted: Kuiper Belt Targets
New Horizons team launches search for post-Pluto flyby prospects
April 20, 2011

The New Horizons team, working with astronomers using some of the
largest telescopes on Earth, will begin searching this month for distant
Kuiper Belt objects that the New Horizons spacecraft hopes to
reconnoiter after completing its observations of the Pluto system in
mid-2015.

No spacecraft has ever visited the Kuiper Belt, a distant, donut-shaped
region of the solar system filled with small planets and comets that
formed early in the solar system's history.

While the main target for NASA's New Horizons mission is Pluto and its
three moons, New Horizons was built with post-Pluto Kuiper Belt object
(KBO) flybys in mind.

"We have enough fuel on New Horizons, and there are enough Kuiper Belt
objects out there, that we have a good chance of visiting at least one
of them, probably one that's at least 50 kilometers [about 30 miles]
across," says New Horizons co-investigator John Spencer, of Southwest
Research Institute, who is coordinating the search effort. "But first,
we have to find them."
 
Spencer cites two reasons why suitable target KBOs aren't already known.
First, they are likely to be more than 10,000 times fainter than Pluto -
near the very limit of what large telescopes can detect. Second, by a
twist of fate, the current location of objects that New Horizons can
reach is superimposed on the dense star fields of the Milky Way's
center, in the constellation Sagittarius, which is the hardest region of
the Kuiper Belt to search for faint KBOs.

[Image]
Enlisted for the New Horizons KBO-target search: The 8-meter Subaru and
3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii (inset) telescopes at Mauna Kea
Observatory in Hawaii. (Credit: Subaru Telescope; CFHT)

"As a result, we have to conduct a special, dedicated search to find our
target KBOs," says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, also
of the Southwest Research Institute. "And, because it will take two to
three years to net a range of potential targets and refine their orbits
and physical characteristics well enough to select the best one or two
for New Horizons, we have long planned to begin this work in 2011, so we
can have our targets selected and propose this extended mission to NASA
before we get to Pluto."
 
To conduct the KBO search, the New Horizons project has recruited an
international team of astronomers from nine institutions in the U.S.,
Canada, France and Chile, which has secured 140 total hours of observing
time between April-July 2011 on some of the world's premier telescopes,
including the 8-meter Subaru and 3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii
telescopes at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, and the twin 6.5-meter
Magellan telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

During the search, which begins later this month, these telescopes will
take thousands of wide-field images, containing millions of stars. The
search team will then sort through this mass of data to find a few
moving points of light, with orbits in the Kuiper Belt. After follow-up
observations next year to refine the orbits of these flyby candidates,
one or two of them may become a New Horizons target.

"Other than New Horizons, no existing or planned spacecraft has the
chance to explore KBOs, which are ancient and highly scientifically
valuable relicts of the era of outer solar system formation," Stern
says. "We're very proud to carry that banner for NASA and the scientific
community."
Received on Wed 20 Apr 2011 02:26:18 PM PDT