NASA announced that it identified three potential targets for the mission of the New Horizons spacecraft after its Pluto flyby. They are Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) found using the Hubble Space Telescope exactly for this purpose.

The research program of KBOs was successful from the start, leading to the discovery of two interesting objects and then three more. In particular, the first object discovered, identified as 1110113Y, was subsequently defined certainty targetable. For this reason, it’s called PT1 by the team of the New Horizons mission.

Two more of the five KBOs found by the Hubble Space Telescope have been called PT2 and PT3 by the New Horizons mission team, which defined them as potentially targetable. They will require further observations over the coming months to track more accurately their orbits and understand whether and how the spacecraft will be able to reach one of them.

The observations made so far have allowed to understand something of the nature of these KBOs. Astronomers always hope to find more planets in the solar system but the potential targets of the New Horizons mission are essentially large asteroids with a diameter estimated between 25 and 55 kilometers (between 15 and 34 miles).

Their distance from the Sun is more than forty times that of the Earth so their light is very dim and it was hard to even find them. Measuring their size accurately is even more difficult and probably we’ll see the real aspect only of the KBO that will actually be reached by the New Horizons spacecraft.

These KBOs are debris left over from the solar system’s formation phase, as a result they have remained virtually unchanged except for the occasional collision for billions of years. Such objects have contributed to the formation of the planets that exist today and it’s for this reason that they are so interesting.

For budget reasons, the New Horizons space probe was supplied with enough fuel to reach only one of the KBOs identified. The exact trajectory will be determined at a later time but probably the target will be reached in 2019.

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