New Horizons Pluto Mission gets help from Hubble Space Telescope

This July (2015), NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly by Pluto taking images and collecting data about the formerly-classified 9th planet. After that, the spacecraft will head out to explore the Kuiper Belt – a vast rim of primordial debris encircling our solar system.

This week NASA announced that the Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered three Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) which may be good targets for New Horizons to investigate during its mission.

The KBOs, say NASA researchers, 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 New Horizons team found the objects using Hubble after being allotted with time on the space telescope to hopefully do just that.



“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 objects found by the team using Hubble are “each about 10 times larger than typical comets, but only about 1-2 percent of the size of Pluto.” While comets and lose layers of material each time they pass by the sun, these KBOs are thought to have remained in this area of deep-freeze since the birth of our solar system some 4.6 billion years ago, and could have a lot to tell NASA scientists.

The team has been looking for suitable KBOs for several years now. While they had previously found many, until now they had not found any within reach of the New Horizons spacecraft and the amount of fuel onboard.

“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.”