The spacecraft, developed for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the Southwest Research Institute, in the US, carried out a historic reconnaissance flight of the Pluto-Charon system last July that has provided data key on the geology and composition of the dwarf planet and its moons. In this way, it has been possible to observe, for example, the presence of water ice on Pluto and its tenuous bluish atmosphere.
Now, those responsible for the mission have ordered New Horizons to maneuver towards 2014 MU69 , an enigmatic body about 45 kilometers in diameter that orbits 1.6 billion kilometers from Pluto. The body, which has also been called PT1 (Potential Target 1) and 1110113Y, was detected by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014, and, in essence, has been selected because the spacecraft could approach it in a reasonable amount of time and using less fuel than it would need to use to target other objects in this region of the solar system.
For 2014 MU69 still does not have much data: it is estimated that it takes 293 years to complete one revolution around the Sun and is about ten times larger and a thousand times more massive than most comets, although its size barely represents 1% Pluto’s. The idea, in any case, is that the probe approaches less than 12,500 kilometers from its surface. As Alan Stern, scientific director of the New Horizons mission, has indicated in Sky & Telescope magazine, “ although this approach will probably not be as spectacular as the exploration of Pluto, it will also set a new record , in this case that of research in situ of the most distant object carried out to date ”.
As it heads to its new destination, the probe will make observations of the heliosphere as well as photometric studies of twenty other objects in the Kuiper belt, which it will capture from afar. When MU69 reaches 2014, the device will study in detail its surface, temperature , mass and composition, as well as the possible existence of satellites and geological processes.
Imagen: NASA/Johns Hopkins University/SRI/S. Gribben
