As had been expected, the historic New Horizons mission will continue as the first spacecraft to ever visit the dwarf planet Pluto will now travel to an 2014 MU69, an object located even deeper in the Kuiper Belt, officials at the US space agency confirmed on Friday afternoon.
New Horizons, which became the first probe to ever complete a flyby of Pluto in July 2015, will now head towards 2014 MU69, a tiny Kuiper Belt object (KBO) located about one million miles (1.6 billion km) from Pluto. It is expected to rendezvous with the KBO on January 1, 2019.
“The New Horizons mission to Pluto exceeded our expectations and even today the data from the spacecraft continue to surprise,” NASA’s Director of Planetary Science Jim Green said in a July 1 press release. “We’re excited to continue onward into the dark depths of the outer solar system to a science target that wasn’t even discovered when the spacecraft launched.”
NASA also announced that it had decided to keep the Dawn spacecraft at Ceres for now rather than have it travel to the main belt asteroid Adeona, as Green explaining that continued tracking of Ceres as it moves closer to the sun “has the potential to provide more significant science” than a flyby of Adeona.
Why 2014 MU69, and what exactly will the mission entail?
Although both 2014 MU69 and Pluto are located in the same region of space, the two objects are quite different, according to Space.com. Pluto is 1,474 miles (2,372 km) wide, while 2014 MU69 is much smaller, with an estimated width of just 13 to 25 miles (21 to 40 km).
New Horizons is expected to come within 1,900 miles (3,000 km) of the 2014 MU69 during its 2019 flyby, or about four times closer to the object than it was during its Pluto flyby, the agency noted. The undisturbed, four million year old object is believed to be the most pristine ever to be visited by a spacecraft, according to principle investigator Alan Stern.
“We discovered 2014 MU69 (or MU69, for short) in a dedicated search for possible extended mission flyby targets that we conducted in 2014, using the Hubble Space Telescope,” Stern, who works out of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, wrote in an April blog post. It is roughly 500,000 times less massive than Pluto, placing it “in a key intermediate size regime to better understand planetary accretion,” he added.
Stern went on to note that New Horizons would be using all seven of its scientific instruments to study the Kuiper Belt object, and that its encounter with MU69 “will include detailed global and high-resolution mapping, including color mapping… compositional mapping, searches for moons of MU69, studies of its surface properties, and searches for an atmosphere.”
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Image credit: NASA
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