After Pluto: New Horizons’ Next Target is a Relict of Creation

An artist's impression of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flying past its next target. (Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Steve Gribben) Far, far past Pluto, the most distant object humanity has ever visited, there’s a tiny world fainter than any seen in that part of our solar system. Its dark orbit reaches a billion miles beyond the former ninth planet. But 2014 MU69, as it’s labeled by astronomers, is just a few dozen miles across — too scant to be spherical. There’s nothing particularly special about it. Thousands of similarly mysterious and icy worlds lurk in these celestial suburbs. Yet it’s precisely its banality that makes this little prince of a planet so special — 2014 MU69 is made of the very stuff of creation. And on Jan. 1, 2019, an army of astronomers will turn their gaze to this world for a few hours, as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft blazes by at some 8 miles per second. At the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Pasadena, California, this week, astronomers discussed how the spacecraft’s next target is coming into focus. A team has been using the Hubble Space Telescope, which also first detected 2014 MU69 during a hunt for additional New Horizons targets, to learn more about the distant world. “We’re going to fly past something in the solar system that is about as old as we possibly can,” says Planetary Science Institute astronomer Susan Benecchi. “And that’s exciting because it’s information we couldn’t glean otherwise.”