New Horizons has a New Target

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Part of the plan for the New Horizons probe has been for it to flypast another Kuiper Belt object after its 2015 Pluto encounter. Looks like the search using Hubble has finally turned up some promising targets. The leading candidate is a body about 30km across that New horizons would reach in 2019. Despite the 4 year transit the mission planners were running out of time to find a suitable KBO, as the probe needs to perform a slingshot maneuver around Pluto to reach it.