Finding New Horizons KBO Targets
This web site provides information about the search for Kuiper Belt
objects (or possibly Centaurs) that are reachable by the New Horizons mission after (or
possibly before) its Pluto encounter. Some of these objects will
become the first KBOs to be visited by spacecraft. But first we have to
find them!
- There was be another DPS workshop at the Monterey DPS meeting in
September 2003. Here is a
Powerpoint version of my presentation at that meeting (9 MB in size).
This presentation includes the latest information on the abundance
of faint KBOs from the recent work of Bernstein et al. (2003).
An update since that workshop is that we have done more work on
the effects of background confusion on the detection of faint moving
objects in crowded star fields. The good news is that confusion may
be less of a problem than originally feared, and limiting magnitudes
may not be much brighter than in sparse fields.
- Here is a report on New Horizons KBO search strategies submitted to the
proceedings of the March 2003 TNO
Workshop, Antofagasta, Chile. An updated version of the study
reported at the 2002 DPS (below). MS-Word
format and postscript format.
- A workshop titled Finding the
New Horizons KBO Flyby Targets, was held before the DPS meeting
in Birmingham, Alabama, on October 6th 2002. The 18 attendees included
representatives from all the current major KBO search programs.
Workshop Summary, including
John Spencer's presentation outlining the issues.
Return to John Spencer's Home Page