New Horizons space mission with Boulder ties finds new targets beyond Pluto

An artist's rendering of a Kuiper Belt object, about 4 billion miles from the sun, which may be reachable by the Boulder-director New Horizons mission, (Courtesy illustration / NASA, aESA and G. Bacon)

The New Horizons mission to Pluto, a space adventure with strong Boulder ties, now has three new targets for its work in the distant reaches of our solar system.

NASA announced Wednesday that its Hubble telescope, through a dedicated observing program overseen by a New Horizons search team, had discovered three Kuiper Belt objects that the New Horizons spacecraft could possibly visit after it passes Pluto in July.

Alan Stern of Boulder's Southwest Research Institute is the principal investigator on the New Horizons mission, University of Colorado professor Fran Bagenal is a co-investigator, and the spacecraft carries an instrument known as the Student Dust Counter, designed and built by CU undergraduate and graduate students.

"The problem is that we wanted to go somewhere after Pluto, to compare Pluto with another object," Bagenal said Wednesday. That object was going to have to be on generally the same trajectory New Horizons is taking to Pluto, because its available fuel would permit no more than a 2 degree change in its current course beyond Pluto.

"If we hadn't been able to find a target (beyond Pluto) we'd be sailing off into nothingness," Stern said.

The New Horizons team started searching for suitable Kuiper Belt objects three years ago with some of the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth. They found several dozen KBOs, as they are known, but none could be reached with the fuel available on the New Horizons spacecraft.

The team was awarded Hubble telescope time by the Space Telescope Science Institute for a wider survey in July. By the time the search was finished last month, they identified one KBO that is considered "definitely reachable," and two others that may be accessible, but that will require more tracking over several months to know whether they also can be reached.

They are about 1 billion miles beyond Pluto, ranging in size from 34 miles across down to 15 miles across. Each is about 10 times the size of a typical comet and about 1 to 2 percent the size of Pluto.

"It's a big relief, because it means we get double the targets and double the science, right?" Bagenal said. "From what we've seen of the objects in the Kuiper Belt, they are all different colors, their composition and sizes differ, some of them have moons, some of them have atmosphere, some don't have atmosphere. So, getting to two out of the thousands-plus that we know are there will be at least twice as good as one."

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New Horizons space mission with Boulder ties finds new targets beyond Pluto