NASA Releases Breathtaking Video of New Horizons’ Pluto Flyby

The New Horizons probe is past Pluto and on its way to the Kuiper belt, and NASA has already settled on a candidate for the next flyby. The agency will conduct a review process before it approves an extension and the New Horizons team must also submit a proposal for 2014 MU69.

New Horizons conserved energy by taking naps on its 3 billion mile journey to Pluto.

As such, 2014 MU69 is thought to be like the building blocks of Kuiper Belt planets such as Pluto.

In a statement released over the weekend, NASA announced that 2014 MU69 – an object in the region of the outer Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt, almost a billion miles from Pluto – is likely to be the spacecraft’s next destination.

Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, said NASA’s selection of 2014 MU69 is “a great choice” for the secondary mission.

Scientist know that there are still a lot more they could discover after hitting the next target, but that “there are low odds that we would find something within the remaining fuel”, Stern said, according to New York Times.

An incredible new video takes viewers along for the ride during a NASA spacecraft’s epic July flyby of Pluto.

The Kuiper Belt is a disk-shaped region full of minor planets outside the orbit of Neptune.

Like all Nasa missions that have finished their main objective but seek to do more exploration, the New Horizons team must write a proposal to the agency to fund a KBO mission. It will reach at its new target on New Year’s Day 2019. If the mission is successful, the orbiter is expected to beam back detailed images and scientific data on a space body that was never surveyed so closely before. It is 1.6 billion kilometres farther away than Pluto. The spacecraft may have enough power for two more decades of exploration, according to NASA.

As for New Horizons, the spaceship continues its travels at incredibly fast speeds with the aim of reaching an object in the Kuiper Belt in less than four years.

The data will significantly improve our understanding of the Kuiper Belt and KBOs.

This intrepid craft has had its next possible target identified by NASA.

Beyond that, everything about the movie is accurate: The Pluto hemisphere we see on closest approach, the lighting and shadows, the atmosphere’s size (though its brightness has been increased), the orbits of the satellites, the colors are our best estimate for what your eye would see, and so on.