Artistic view of Kuiper Belt object. Credit: NASA/ESA/G.Bacon
Want to be known as a far out “Ice Hunter” for NASA’s New Horizons mission now en route to the Pluto system?
A citizen science project has been established – one that can help scientists search through specially-obtained telescopic images for currently unknown objects in the Kuiper Belt.
Ice Hunters is a Zooniverse citizen science project.
Through this citizen science project, the public can help scientists search through specially-obtained telescopic images for currently unknown objects in the Kuiper Belt. Along the way, they will also discover variable stars and asteroids. Ice Hunters is a Zooniverse citizen science project.
To Pluto…and beyond!
“We’re employing citizen science to help find our potential extended mission flyby targets, perhaps a billion kilometers farther than even distant Pluto and its moons,” explained Alan Stern, New Horizons mission Principal Investigator at the Southwest Research Institute.
“We hope the public will be excited to join in with us and with Zooniverse to make a little history of their own by discovering our next flyby target after Pluto,” Stern added in a New Horizons mission news update.
New Horizons launched in January 2006, and is the first NASA New Frontiers mission.
The spacecraft tested its instruments during a 2007 flyby of the planet Jupiter, and scientists now eagerly await its July 2015 flight through the Pluto system. After visiting Pluto, the spacecraft will have enough fuel remaining to change its course to fly toward at least one and possibly two Kuiper Belt objects in the outer solar system – an object the Ice Hunters website is designed to find.
Ice Hunters will do its part to study one small slice of the Kuiper Belt as it looks for an object along New Horizons’ trajectory after its Pluto flyby.
Want more information?
Go to:
http://www.icehunters.org/
By Leonard David