MEXICO: The spacecraft that gave us the first close-up views of Pluto now has a much smaller object in its sights.
NASA’s New Horizons was programmed to fire its thrusters today afternoon, putting it on 0track to fly past a recently discovered, less than 30-mile-wide object out on the solar system frontier.
The close encounter with what’s known as 2014 MU69 would occur in 2019.
It orbits nearly 1.6 billion kilometers (1 billion miles) beyond Pluto.
Flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, sent commands in advance for the course change.
In all, four maneuvers will be needed, carried out over the next two weeks.
Today afternoon’s was the first; it was expected to be several hours before controllers received confirmation that everything had gone well.
Launched in 2006, New Horizons became Pluto’s first visitor from planet Earth in July.
The spacecraft remains in excellent health following a 4.8 billion kilometer (3 billion-mile) journey and still holds a year’s worth of scientific data for transmission back to Earth.
NASA and the New Horizons team chose 2014 MU69 in August as New Horizons’ next potential target, thus the nickname PT-1.
Like Pluto, MU69 orbits the sun in the frozen, twilight zone known as the Kuiper Belt.
The extremely remote, faint object was spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014.
It beat out a few other candidates because it will take less fuel to get there.
