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NASA names New Horizons' next target

Just another BEEELLION miles to go before probe reaches interesting Kuiper Belt object

NASA has tentatively named the next target for its New Horizons' probe.

Now that the probe has finished its Pluto fly-by – although, as NASA notes, it's still busily transmitting the bulk of the images and data it collected back to Earth – the agency says it reckons a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) called 2014 MU69 is a suitable next-stop.

Since 2014 MU69 is nearly a billion miles past the probe's current location, it would take until January 1, 2019 to get there.

While mission scientists won't be able to seek funding approval for the mission extension until 2016, NASA explains it needs to set New Horizons on its new course this year, so that the probe could reach the KBO with “healthy fuel margins”.

Hence the nomination of 2014 MU69 as the target. Ground-based surveys, NASA explains, had failed to identify any KBO candidates that New Horizons could reach, and it was only in 2014 that the Hubble Space Telescope spotted potential candidates.

New Horizons' step farther out

Ready, aim, fire: NASA's proposed path for New Horizons. Click to embiggen

NASA's press release quotes New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern as saying 2014 MU69 is “just the kind of ancient KBO, formed where it orbits now, that the Decadal Survey desired us to fly by. 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.”

Stern adds that the spacecraft “carries extra hydrazine fuel for a KBO flyby; its communications system is designed to work from far beyond Pluto; its power system is designed to operate for many more years; and its scientific instruments were designed to operate in light levels much lower than it will experience during the 2014 MU69 flyby.”

The KBO in question is estimated to be just 45 km across, between 0.5 and 1 per cent the size and 1/10,000th the mass of Pluto. ®

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