With help from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have finally identified orbiting objects in the Kuiper Belt that could be visited by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. New Horizons was launched in 2006 and flew past Neptune this August, it is scheduled for a flyby of Pluto in July 2015.

The Kuiper Belt, a collection of relatively small objects thought to be leftover from the formation of the solar system, lies beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto, orbiting roughly 40 times further from the sun than Earth.

When New Horizons launched, astronomers began rushing to find objects in the Kuiper Belt that the craft could potentially visit.

“After years of searching, my team and I have found a world in the Kuiper Belt for New Horizons to visit after Pluto,” said astronomer Alex Parker of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “In fact, we may have up to three Kuiper Belt Objects to choose from, but the other two require further follow-up to confirm.”

“Potential Target 1,” according to Parker, is several tens of kilometers in diameter with a near-circular orbit. “The two other [potential targets] are brighter [and larger] objects, so if they are confirmed targetable, they may beat PT1 in the final selection,” he wrote.

A NASA press release claims that the Kuiper Belt Objects identified by the Hubble are on average about 10 times the size of a typical comet, but only one to two percent the size of Pluto.

“We started to get worried that we could not find anything suitable, even with Hubble, but in the end the space telescope came to the rescue,” noted astronomer John Spencer, also with the Southwest Research Institute. “There was a huge sigh of relief when we found suitable KBOs.”