[meteorite-list] NASA's Hubble Telescope Finds Potential Kuiper Belt Targets for New Horizons Pluto Mission

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 10:58:52 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201410151758.s9FHwqjh005722_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

October 15, 2014
     
NASA's Hubble Telescope Finds Potential Kuiper Belt Targets for New Horizons Pluto Mission

Peering out to the dim, outer reaches of our solar system, NASA's Hubble
Space Telescope has uncovered three Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) the agency's
New Horizons spacecraft could potentially visit after it flies by Pluto in
July 2015.

The KBOs were detected through a dedicated Hubble observing program by a New
Horizons search team that was awarded telescope time for this purpose.

"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 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 was 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
New Horizons science 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."

Following an initial proof of concept of the Hubble pilot observing program
in June, the New Horizons Team was awarded telescope time by the Space
Telescope Science Institute for a wider survey in July. When the search was
completed in early September, the team identified one KBO that is considered
"definitely reachable," and two other potentially accessible KBOs that
will require more tracking over several months to know whether they too are
accessible by the New Horizons spacecraft.

This was a needle-in-haystack search for the New Horizons team because the
elusive KBOs are extremely small, faint, and difficult to pick out against a
myriad background of stars in the constellation Sagittarius, which is in the
present direction of Pluto. The three KBOs identified each are a whopping 1
billion miles beyond Pluto. Two of the KBOs are estimated to be as large as
34 miles (55 kilometers) across, and the third is perhaps as small as 15
miles (25 kilometers).

The New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2006 from Florida, is the first
mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program. Once a NASA mission completes its
prime mission, the agency conducts an extensive science and technical review
to determine whether extended operations are warranted.

The New Horizons team expects to submit such a proposal to NASA in late 2016
for an extended mission to fly by one of the newly identified KBOs. Hurtling
across the solar system, the New Horizons spacecraft would reach the distance
of 4 billion miles from the sun at its farthest point roughly three to four
years after its July 2015 Pluto encounter. Accomplishing such a KBO flyby
would substantially increase the science return from the New Horizons mission
as laid out by the 2003 Planetary Science Decadal Survey.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between
NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science
Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is
operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in
Astronomy, Inc., in Washington.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel,
Maryland, manages the New Horizons mission for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate. APL also built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft.

For images of the KBOs and more information about Hubble, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

For information about the New Horizons mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons

-end-

Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726
dwayne.c.brown at nasa.gov

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
410-338-4514
Villard at stsci.edu
Received on Wed 15 Oct 2014 01:58:52 PM PDT