NASA made history in July when it flew past Pluto with the New Horizons spacecraft, but it's not stopping there.
New Horizons is zooming farther and farther out into the Kuiper Belt — a zone of trillions of small, icy objects that litter the outer edge of our Solar System. The objects are so old and so cold they're basically frozen celestial time capsules.
As a followup to the Pluto flyby, the team behind NASA's mission wants to steer the spacecraft toward a Kuiper Belt object (KBO) known as 2014 MU69, which is nicknamed Potential Target 1 (PT1).
PT1 is one of three potential targets NASA was considering. It's nearly a billion miles beyond Pluto and only about 30 miles wide. Because New Horizons has very little fuel left, there's only a short window of opportunity to point New Horizons in the right direction — if it's not made this fall, the spacecraft might miss its target years from now.
The team will begin steering New Horizons toward PT1, which is about 4 billion miles from Earth, sometime in October.
If the spacecraft makes it, it'd be another historic first because we've never seen anything in the Kuiper Belt up-close, save Pluto. KBOs are so far away from the sun, they're almost perfectly frozen samples of the material leftover from the Solar System's formation some 4.6 billion years ago. Studying them could reveal things we never knew before about our origins in space.
Before New Horizons can visit PT1 and extend the mission, though, the team needs NASA's approval and the funding to back it.
But everyone seems to be feeling upbeat about getting that approval.
“[W]e expect it to be much less expensive than the prime mission while still providing new and exciting science," John Grunsfeld, chief of NASA's science mission directorate, said in a press release.
The New Horizons mission cost about $700 million, but there aren't specific numbers on what a mission to PT1 will cost yet. The New Horizons team expects to fly by PT1 in 2019 if all goes according to plan.
