''Hubble to help out NASA’s New Horizons probe''

On Sunday, the piano-sized spacecraft woke up from hibernation for a months-long checkup. Right now it's 2.7 billion miles (4.3 billion kilometers) from Earth, and roughly 290 million miles (470 million kilometers) from Pluto.

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NASA announced on Wednesday that the Hubble Space Telescope will soon begin to hunt for the best object outside our solar system for the space agency’s New Horizons probe to investigate after passing Pluto in July 2015. The probe was launched in 2006 with the goal of exploring the outer depths of the solar system and beyond.

Hubble will start the search this month by focusing on the Kupier belt, a debris field of icy objects left over from the formation of our solar system. The decision to home in on Kupier belt objects (KBOs) was made in part because of a series of observations made during discretionary time on Hubble. This information led to the identification of two KBOs that could fit the bill; a wider search will take place if these two bodies are found to be inadequate.

The initial search of the Kupier belt was conducted from June 16 to June 26. Hubble scoped out 20 areas of the sky as part of the investigation. Scientists combed through the program’s photos with advanced software tools for speeding up the recognition process. The telescope’s keen metallic eye and heightened sensitivity allowed it to view faint KBOs as they fell across the stars in the background. These objects were imperceptible to some of the largest land-based telescopes.

“Once again the Hubble Space Telescope has demonstrated the ability to explore the universe in new and unexpected ways,” said John Grunsfeld, the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA’s headquarters in the nation’s capital.

Last month, NASA announced that New Horizons would take a closer look at Pluto’s ice-covered moon Charon. This investigation aims to determine if the interior of the moon is warm enough to have housed a subterranean ocean of liquid water.

Both Charon and Pluto are believed to have a surface temperature of 380 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. While this is certainly far too cold for liquid water to exist, what lies beneath the surface remains to be seen.

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Hubble observations will begin in July and are expected to conclude in August.

Assuming a suitable target is found at the completion of the survey and some follow-up observations later in the year, if NASA approves, the New Horizon's trajectory can be modified in the fall of 2015 to rendezvous with a Kuiper belt object (KBO) three to four years later.

The Kuiper belt is a debris field of icy bodies left over from the solar system's formation 4.6 billion years ago. Though the belt was hypothesized in a 1951 science paper by astronomer Gerard Kuiper, no Kuiper belt objects were found until the early 1990s. So far over 1,000 KBOs have been cataloged, though it's hypothesized many more KBOs exist.

Hubble view of Kuiper belt objects

These two multiple-exposure images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show Kuiper Belt objects, or KBOs, against a background of stars in the constellation Sagittarius. The two KBOs are roughly 4 billion miles from Earth.

The approval for additional observing time for the needle-in-a-haystack search is based on the analysis of a set of pilot observations obtained with the STScI director's discretionary time on Hubble. After a swift and intensive data analysis of approximately 200 Hubble images, the NH team met the pilot program criterion of finding a minimum of two KBOs.

"Once again the Hubble Space Telescope has demonstrated the ability to explore the Universe in new and unexpected ways," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.  "Hubble science is at its best when it works in concert with other NASA missions and ground based observatories."

It will be many weeks before the team can establish whether either of these pilot-program KBOs is a suitable target for New Horizons to visit, but their discovery provides sufficient evidence that a wider search to be executed with Hubble will find an optimum object.

"I am delighted that our initial investment of Hubble time paid off. We are looking forward to see if the team can find a suitable KBO that New Horizons might be able to visit after its fly-by of Pluto." said STScI director Matt Mountain.

New Horizons' primary goal is to send a spacecraft flying past Pluto and its moons in July 2015, more than nine years after it was launched. It's the first mission designed to study a broad belt of icy material on the solar system's rim known as the Kuiper Belt.

First, Hubble is spending 40 of its valuable orbits to see if it can spot at least two faint Kuiper Belt objects, or KBOs. If that test pans out, Stern said another 160 orbits or so would be used for a more thorough survey of the region of sky around where New Horizons is going — an area that takes up roughly the angular size of the full moon in the constellation Sagittarius.

"From the total of 200 orbits, we have a 95 percent chance of finding one or more targetable KBOs," Stern said. "We follow that, or those, and then burn the engine in the fall [of 2015] after the Pluto flyby."

If a suitable target is found, Stern estimated that the encounter would take place "between 2016 and 2021, most likely farther out." Despite Pluto's reclassification as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union in 2006, and even though the flyby is still more than a year away, interest in the New Horizons mission is rising fast — in part because it represents the first mission to a little-understood planetary frontier.

-via-thespacereporter