NASA's Pluto Probe Is Already Planning Its Next Job

Fans of both exploring the distant reaches of the solar system, and, um, fiscal responsibility have reason to celebrate this week: the search for where NASA's New Horizons space probe can visit after Pluto will continue.

The New Horizons probe launched in 2006 for a 10-year, three-billion-mile mission to explore the then-farthest planet from the sun, Pluto. Since the launch, Pluto went from being the smallest planet to being reclassified as the largest object in the Kuiper Belt, which is a sort of debris field of leftovers from the solar system's formation. It's so far from Earth, and also the Sun's light, that the Kuiper belt was a hypothesis for forty years until we finally had tech capable of spotting its small, dark, icy objects in the early 90s.

Since New Horizons launched, the plan all along has been to take it on a spin through the Kuiper Belt three or four years after it checks out Pluto in July 2015 so it can explore other objects way out there. It'll be the first probe to see Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, and only the fifth probe to traverse interplanetary space that far from the Sun. The only problem with the plan has been that astronomers haven't found any Kuiper Belt objects on New Horizons's path. There are probably billions of objects there, but we just can't see them from any but the most powerful telescopes here on Earth.

That's, of course, why we have the Hubble telescope up in orbit: for seeing things that we can't see from our telescopes on the ground. But there's a lot of competition for getting time with the Hubble and the researchers were lucky to get 200 orbits to look for other KBOs (Kuiper Belt objects) and find one the probe could visit. There was still a catch though:

“We get 40 orbits right off the bat, but we have to find at least two new objects in that time or they don’t give us the other 160,” New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute told Time Magazine.

I kind of like how that sounds a little bit like a game show or a checkpoint in a racing game, but I can also empathize with how stressful it must be, which is why it's both a relief and kind of exciting that NASA announced that those first two new objects have been spotted, and the intensive search—and additional 160 orbits—are going forward.

"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 Space Telescope Science Institute director Matt Mountain.

It's important to find a target object as soon as possible. To reach a Kuiper Belt object as scheduled, the space probe's trajectory will have to be modified shortly after reaching Pluto, which it is scheduled to reach in just a year and two weeks.

The main course is coming up. Let's hope Hubble delivers dessert.