Beyond Pluto: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft heads to next adventure
Artist's illustration of the New Horizons spacecraft flying by the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 on Jan. 1, 2019. (Image/NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Alex Parker)
Nearly two years after its historic encounter with the dwarf planet Pluto, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is getting ready for its next big adventure in the icy outskirts of the solar system.
Now, the spacecraft is on its way to a small, ancient object located about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto in the Kuiper Belt. This distant region surrounds the solar system and is filled with trillions of icy rocks that have yet to be explored. The new target was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in June 2014, and it was dubbed 2014 MU69.
Pluto, which officially lost its planetary status shortly after New Horizons launched in 2006, is also a Kuiper Belt object (KBO), and the largest of its kind. New Horizons became the first spacecraft to visit the Pluto system when the probe flew by the dwarf planet and its moons on July 14, 2015.
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