NASA Approves New Horizon Mission’s Extension

NASA's New Horizon mission, which carried out the first ever flyby of Pluto in July 2015, has been granted an extension for further probe of the Kuiper Belt. The spacecraft is now reportedly ready to investigate a small object beyond Pluto, known as 2014 MU69, located 1.6 billion kilometers beyond the icy dwarf planet, in a cold and dark area of the Kuiper Belt. The extended mission is scheduled for a flyby of 2014 MU69 on Jan 1 2019.

"The New Horizons mission to Pluto exceeded our expectations, and even today the data from the spacecraft continue to surprise," said Jim Green, NASA's Director of Planetary Science. "We are excited to continue onward into the dark depths of the outer solar system to a science target that was not even discovered when the spacecraft launched". Incidentally the 2014 MU69 was detected on 26 June 2014 with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, during a preparatory investigation to look for an appropriate object in the Kuiper Belt, for the New Horizons mission to flyby after its observation of Pluto.

According to scientists, the exploration of 2014 MU69 is important to know more about planetary accreditation, as it is thought to be one of the first building blocks of the solar system. The celestial world, which is a comparatively small object with its measurement of 21 to 40 kilometers across, is located so far from the sun that it could be one of the most pristine objects to be ever investigated by a space mission, feels Alan Stern who is the principal investigator of New Horizons. In addition, the scheduled flyby will see the spacecraft reaching four times nearer to MU69 than it did for Pluto. Stern also thinks that the MU69 flyby will be a landmark event because this would be the farthest instant of deep space exploration to date.