NASA Hubble Space Telescope Spots New Kuiper Belt Objects for Pluto Mission

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has targeted some new objects for the New Horizons spacecraft to investigate after it flies by Pluto in July 2015. NASA scientists have taken a closer look at three Kuiper Belt objects to see whether they'll make good targets for the Pluto mission.

"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, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, in a news release.

In this case, the researchers employed a dedicated Hubble observing program. Hubble examined the Kuiper Belt, which is a vast rim of primordial debris circling our solar system, in order to find possible Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) for New Horizons to visit. KBOs belong to a unique class of solar system objects that has never been visited by spacecraft and which may have clues to the origin of our solar system.

The recently-spotted KBOs are each about 10 times larger than typical comets, but only about one to two percent the size of Pluto. Unlike asteroids, KBOs have not been heated by the sun and are thought to represent a pristine, deep-freeze sample of what the outer solar system was like during its birth about 4.6 billion years ago.

"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 John Spencer, New Horizons science team member. "There was a huge sigh of relief when we found suitable KBOs; we are 'over the moon' about this detection."

Currently, the New Horizons spacecraft is on its way to Pluto. Then, it will intercept these KBOs in order to tell scientists a bit more about our early universe.

Want to learn more about the mission? Check it out on NASA's website.