New Horizons probe may not find a target after Pluto visit

Nature : In 2006, New Horizons was launched on a two-part mission to visit first Pluto and then a yet-to-be-chosen object in the Kuiper belt . Although the spacecraft is currently 4.3 billion km from Earth and most of the way to Pluto, its second destination still hasn’t been chosen—and may never be. The search was started in 2011 to increase the odds that potential targets would be in the cone of space that the probe could reach after passing Pluto. However, the astronomers overestimated the number of dim Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) and have found that detecting them with ground-based observatories has proven difficult. The area of search is aligned with the galactic plane, where most of the stars in our galaxy are located, and the very bright background overwhelms the light reflected from KBOs. The search team believes that the chances of finding a suitable KBO with the current available observation time are less than 40%. However, the team has applied for observation time using Hubble, which, if granted, could raise the chances of success to 90%.