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Continuing on its path through the outer regions of our Solar System, New Horizons has now traveled half the distance from the dwarf planet Pluto to its next target, the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69.
Artist’s impression of New Horizons encountering a Kuiper Belt object. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute / Alex Parker.
New Horizons is currently 486.19 million miles (782.45 million km) from 2014 MU69 and approximately 3.5 billion miles (5.7 billion km) from Earth.
“It’s fantastic to have completed half the journey to our next flyby,” said New Horizons principal investigator Dr. Alan Stern, from the Southwest Research Institute.
“That flyby will set the record for the most distant world ever explored in the history of civilization.”
2014 MU69 was discovered on June 26, 2014 by astronomers using the NASA/ ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
Also known as 1110113Y, it orbits the Sun once every 293 years.
According to NASA scientists, 2014 MU69 is a relatively small Kuiper Belt object (KBO).
It is estimated to have a diameter of 30 miles (48 km) — that’s more than 10 times larger and 1,000 times more massive than typical comets, but only about 0.5 to 1% of the size (and about 1/10,000th the mass) of Pluto.
The surface of this KBO is just as red as, if not redder than, Pluto’s surface.
In preparation for the New Horizons flyby of 2014 MU69, the spacecraft’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) took a series of 10-second exposures of the background star field near the location of its target. This composite image is made from 45 of these 10-second exposures taken on January 28, 2017. The yellow diamond marks the predicted location of 2014 MU69 on approach, but the KBO itself was too far from the spacecraft (544 million miles, or 877 million km) even for LORRI’s telescopic ‘eye’ to detect. New Horizons expects to start seeing 2014 MU69 with LORRI in September of 2018 — and the team will use these newly acquired images of the background field to help prepare for that search on approach. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
New Horizons’ planned rendezvous with 2014 MU69 is January 1, 2019.
“The January 2019 MU69 flyby is the next big event for us, but New Horizons is truly a mission to more broadly explore the Kuiper Belt,” said New Horizons project scientist Dr. Hal Weaver, from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
“In addition to 2014 MU69, we plan to study more than two-dozen other KBOs in the distance and measure the charged particle and dust environment all the way across the Kuiper Belt.”
