“When we were first proposing the mission NASA called for not just a flyby of Pluto, but further study of ancient Kuiper Belt objects, the building blocks of the small planets of the solar system. And so we designed the spacecraft to be able to do that.”

Alan Stern, principal investigator of NASA’s New Horizons Mission that zipped past Pluto July 14th. He spoke October 11th at the ScienceWriters2015 meeting on the campus of M.I.T.

“Now we have to go to NASA with a funding proposal to make this real, but we’ve already found our targets…the extended mission that we plan to fly that we will propose next spring to NASA will result in a flyby of a small Kuiper Belt object on January 1st, 2019. We found these targets with the Hubble Space Telescope. They’re very faint, they’re very hard to do. You can’t find them from the ground. We had five potential targets, we ended up selecting the one that we want to fly to in August. And in fact, in just over two weeks we’ll be firing the engines on New Horizons to retarget in that direction for that flyby…

“It doesn’t have a real name yet, just a license plate. It’s called 2014 MU₆₉. I promise we’ll do better before the flyby. But this is going to be a really fascinating target scientifically. Because this is an object about 10 times bigger and a thousand times more massive than the comet that Rosetta is orbiting. And that comet, by the way, is from the Kuiper Belt, it just came down into the inner solar system due to orbital dynamics. And this object that we’re going to fly by is also about a thousand times less massive than Pluto. So logarithmically it’s perched right in the middle between the comet that we’re studying with Rosetta and Pluto, the small planet that we just flew by and studied with New Horizons. And we’re going to hopefully be able to connect the dots of planetary accretion by studying this object and its composition. It’s been in this deep freeze for four billion years, and it should teach us a lot about the origin of the planets of the Kuiper Belt.”

—Steve Mirsky

[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]