NASA chooses next target after Pluto for New Horizons spacecraft

NASA has selected the next destination for New Horizons, the spacecraft that made a historic flyby past Pluto in July, the space agency announced Friday.

New Horizons, which hurdled past Pluto at 31,000 mph after a 3 billion-mile journey, will next set its sights on an object called 2014 MU69, NASA said. It is located in the Kuiper Belt, a region of frozen asteroid-like objects orbiting at the edge of the solar system.

“Even as the New Horizons 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,” John Grunsfeld, astronaut and chief of the NASA Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a news release.

Because Kuiper Belt objects receive so little warmth from the sun, NASA says they are likely "a well preserved, deep-freeze sample of what the outer solar system was like following its birth 4.6 billion years ago."

The 2014 MU69 object is about 30 miles across and orbits almost a billion miles beyond Pluto, an icy dwarf planet that is also part of the Kuiper Belt, according to NASA.

The New Horizons team still has to do more assessments before finalizing the journey into the outer regions of the Kuiper Belt, including submitting a proposal to NASA due in 2016 that will be evaluated by independent experts. But the spacecraft is expected to reach the tiny object on Jan. 1, 2019.

New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern said in a release that out of the more than a thousand identified Kuiper Belt objects, 2014 MU69 was selected because it would require the least fuel: “This KBO [Kuiper Belt Object] 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."