These images are from a Hubble Space Telescope survey to find Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) in support of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto. The Kuiper Belt is a debris field of icy bodies left over from the solar system's formation 4.6 billion years ago.
Once the New Horizons craft flies by Pluto in mid-2015, the team's goal is to get NASA's approval to retarget the probe to fly by a KBO, which might only measure 20 miles across.
To test the feasibility of finding New Horizons targets with Hubble, a set of pilot Hubble observations were executed in June 2014. After a swift and intensive data analysis of approximately 200 Hubble images, the New Horizons team met the pilot program criterion of finding a minimum of two KBOs.
Multiple exposures taken with Hubble tracked the KBOs moving against the background field of stars in the summer constellation Sagittarius.
The image at left shows a KBO at an estimated distance of approximately 4 billion miles from Earth. Its position noticeably shifts between exposures taken approximately 10 minutes apart. The image at right shows a second KBO at roughly a similar distance.
The positions of these newly discovered objects are not consistent with any KBOs discovered previously. In reality, they are too faint to have been seen with ground-based telescopes (magnitudes 26.8 and 27.3, respectively).
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.
Credits
NASA, ESA, SwRI, JHU/APL, and the New Horizons KBO Search Team| About The Object | |
|---|---|
| Object Name | 1110113Y and 0720090F |
| Object Description | Kuiper Belt Objects |
| Distance | These objects are roughly 4 billion miles from Earth at the time of observation. |
| About The Data | |
| Data Description | The image was created from Hubble data from the following proposals: and J. Spencer (Southwest Research Institute), H. Weaver (JHU/APL), M. Buie (Southwest Research Institute), M. Showalter (SETI Institute), D. Borncamp (STScI), C. Fuentes (Northern Arizona University), A. Stern (Southwest Research Institute), J. Kavelaars (National Research Council of Canada), M. Belton (NOAO), and J.-M. Petit (CNRS, Observatoire de Besancon). |
| Instrument | HST>WFC3/UVIS |
| Exposure Dates | June 24, 2014, Exposure Time: 31 minutes (5 x 370 seconds) per object |
| Filters | F350LP (long pass) |
| About The Object | |
|---|---|
| Object Name | A name or catalog number that astronomers use to identify an astronomical object. |
| Object Description | The type of astronomical object. |
| R.A. Position | Right ascension – analogous to longitude – is one component of an object's position. |
| Dec. Position | Declination – analogous to latitude – is one component of an object's position. |
| Constellation | One of 88 recognized regions of the celestial sphere in which the object appears. |
| Distance | The physical distance from Earth to the astronomical object. Distances within our solar system are usually measured in Astronomical Units (AU). Distances between stars are usually measured in light-years. Interstellar distances can also be measured in parsecs. |
| Dimensions | The physical size of the object or the apparent angle it subtends on the sky. |
| About The Data | |
| Data Description |
|
| Instrument | The science instrument used to produce the data. |
| Exposure Dates | The date(s) that the telescope made its observations and the total exposure time. |
| Filters | The camera filters that were used in the science observations. |
| About The Image | |
| Image Credit | The primary individuals and institutions responsible for the content. |
| Publication Date | The date and time the release content became public. |
| Color Info | A brief description of the methods used to convert telescope data into the color image being presented. |
| Orientation | The rotation of the image on the sky with respect to the north pole of the celestial sphere. |
