Citizen scientists can help find the next flyby target for
Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft, with Zooniverse's new Ice
Hunters The unmanned probe is currently en-route to the Pluto
system, and in July 2015 it will fly by and study the dwarf
planet and its moons. Once its done, it will still have enough
fuel to explore an additional celestial object -- perhaps a
further billion kilometres from Pluto. The robotic spacecraft
will be deep inside the Kuiper belt by then, a mostly unexplored
region of the solar system that extends beyond the orbit of
Neptune. As well as discovering variable stars and asteroids,
New Horizons will get up close and personal with a public-picked
To find an icy body for New Horizons to hook up with, citizen
science champ Zooniverse has got its mitts on deep telescopic
images for currently unknown objects in the Kuiper belt. It
needs space-obsessed individuals to pour over the images and
find potential destinations. The images have already been
filtered and altered to make objects, asteroi