A Continuing Mission
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft captured the world's attention when it buzzed Pluto in July 2015. In January 2019, it will set another record when it reaches another object in the outer edges of the solar system. Known as 2014 MU69, the ancient object will provide insight into the early life of the sun and its planets. Unlike other things explored by spacecraft, the tiny chip of ice and rock will be the first to be explored by a spacecraft launched before its discovery. Both Pluto and 2014 MU69 lie within the Kuiper Belt, a collection of icy rocks that surrounds the outer reaches of the solar system. These objects are thought to be pristine samples from the early solar system, cast out into the boundary zone through gravitational interactions with the larger objects that would grow into planets. Examining them should reveal insight into what was happening in the solar system in the first stages of its lifetime.
Beyond Pluto
As early as 2003, the National Academy of Sciences' Planetary Decadal Survey strongly recommended that the visit to Pluto include flybys of small Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs). Observing multiple targets would provide greater insight into the previously unexplored segment of the solar system. New Horizons launched in 2006 with extra fuel for such a flyby, and its power and communications systems are prepared to work at distances beyond Pluto's orbit for years to come. In 2011, mission scientists used ground-based telescopes to begin searching for a second target, but none of the new discoveries lay within the reach of New Horizons. In 2014, the Hubble Space Telescope joined the search, locating five potential objects. One of them was 2014 MU69, which was labeled 1110113Y after its June 26, 2014, discovery and PT1 ("potential target 1") after its elevation to one of two possible destinations. In August 2015, the mission team selected 2014 MU69 as its next potential target.
"2014 MU69 is a great choice because it is just the kind of ancient KBO, formed where it orbits now, that the Decadal Survey desired us to fly by," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. "Moreover, this KBO costs less fuel to reach [than other candidate targets], leaving more fuel for the flyby, for ancillary science, and greater fuel reserves to protect against the unforeseen."
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New Horizons Next Target: 2014 MU69
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