KBOS photos on Flickr

Fresh from a recent repaint into the corporate colours, ARRIVA Kent Thameside 1600 KE53 KBO waits patiently to depart from Borough Green Station with the penultimate route 306 working of the day to Bluewater. Tuesday 28th February 2017.

This is now the final ARRIVA vehicle in Kent & Surrey to retain manual blinds (and quite a tidy set!).

TransBus Dart 8.8m - TransBus Mini Pointer (Ex-ARRIVA The Shires 3085)

NASA’s Hubble Telescope Finds Potential Kuiper Belt Targets for New Horizons Pluto Mission by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

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This is an artist’s impression of a Kuiper Belt object (KBO), located on the outer rim of our solar system at a staggering distance of 4 billion miles from the Sun. A HST survey uncovered three KBOs that are potentially reachable by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft after it passes by Pluto in mid-2015.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

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Peering out to the dim, outer reaches of our solar system, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered three Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) the agency’s New Horizons spacecraft could potentially visit after it flies by Pluto in July 2015.

The KBOs were detected through a dedicated Hubble observing program by a New Horizons search team that was awarded telescope time for this purpose.

“This has been a very challenging search and it’s great that in the end Hubble could accomplish a detection – one NASA mission helping another,” said Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission.

The Kuiper Belt is a vast rim of primordial debris encircling our solar system. KBOs belong to a unique class of solar system objects that has never been visited by spacecraft and which contain clues to the origin of our solar system.

The KBOs Hubble found are each about 10 times larger than typical comets, but only about 1-2 percent of the size of Pluto. Unlike asteroids, KBOs have not been heated by the sun and are thought to represent a pristine, well preserved deep-freeze sample of what the outer solar system was like following its birth 4.6 billion years ago. The KBOs found in the Hubble data are thought to be the building blocks of dwarf planets such as Pluto.

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