New Horizons Selects Kuiper Belt Object as Next Flyby Target

Posted on September 4, 2015

NASA's New Horizons team has selected a new mission for the New Horizons spacecraft - a flyby of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69. A detailed assessment will be conducted before the new mission is officially approved. The image above is an artist's impression of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft encountering a large Kuiper Belt object.

New Horizons is coming off a successful flyby of Pluto. The Pluto images included the historic Pluto heart photo. The main images of Pluto are still forthcoming. NASA announced today that it has started the intensive downlinking of tens of gigabits of data the spacecraft collected.

John Grunsfeld, astronaut and chief of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, says in a statement, "Even as the New Horizon's spacecraft speeds away from Pluto out into the Kuiper Belt, and the data from the exciting encounter with this new world is being streamed back to Earth, we are looking outward to the next destination for this intrepid explorer. While discussions whether to approve this extended mission will take place in the larger context of the planetary science portfolio, we expect it to be much less expensive than the prime mission while still providing new and exciting science."

New Horizons would reach 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019. The object is 30 miles (about 45 kilometers) across. This is about 10 times larger and 1,000 times more massive than typical comets but only about 1% the size of Pluto.

New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern says, "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. 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."/p>

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