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posted by martyb on Friday October 17 2014, @01:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the more-than-four-thousand-trips-to-the-moon-and-back dept.

The Hubble Space Telescope has identified three Kupier Belt Objects (KBOs) which are potential targets for the New Horizons Pluto Mission following the Pluto flyby in 2015.

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 New Horizons mission to Pluto is looking at the options for trajectories to reach one of these KBOs following Pluto, and one of the identified KBO candidates is "definitely reachable" using the remaining fuel, with the other two KBOs are potentially reachable, but will require further tracking to be certain.

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.

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  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday October 17 2014, @08:08AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Friday October 17 2014, @08:08AM (#106910) Journal

    I was really hoping that Sedna was on the list. But no such luck. And things are so far apart out there.

    • (Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Friday October 17 2014, @11:56AM

      by sudo rm -rf (2357) on Friday October 17 2014, @11:56AM (#106956) Journal
      Yes, it's a pity. A quick wolfram|alpha search [wolframalpha.com] shows Sedna is over 10 billion miles away from Pluto at the moment on the opposite side [wolframalpha.com] of the solar system.
      • (Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Friday October 17 2014, @08:06PM

        by Foobar Bazbot (37) on Friday October 17 2014, @08:06PM (#107135) Journal

        10 billion miles, really?

        For anyone who wants that in units appropriate for interplanetary distances, it's 110 au, or 920 light-minutes.

        • (Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Saturday October 18 2014, @05:52AM

          by sudo rm -rf (2357) on Saturday October 18 2014, @05:52AM (#107273) Journal

          Of course, I'm all for metric units (I suppose au is metric too?).
          110 au is what my first link gives as an answer, but I chose the 10 billion miles unit to keep it in relation with the "1 billion miles" from TFA.

    • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday October 17 2014, @03:48PM

      by wonkey_monkey (279) on Friday October 17 2014, @03:48PM (#107059) Homepage

      Is there any scientific reason to suspect Sedna might be more interesting than any other KBO?

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk
      • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday October 18 2014, @02:01AM

        by aristarchus (2645) on Saturday October 18 2014, @02:01AM (#107231) Journal

        Well, there is this :

        Sedna's exceptionally long and elongated orbit, taking approximately 11,400 years to complete

        , which is cool. But more the idea that Sedna is the Inuit goddess of the sea, with a lot of domestic violence and walruses, and the boundless deep being sort of what the Kuiper region is, generally. . . . OK, no scientific reason! Give us a break, Gov'ner!!