Next Stop: Kuiper!

NASA has decided which object the New Horizons probe will stop by and visit next: A piece of floating real estate that goes by the name 2014 MU69.

The 30-mile diameter rock is a part of what astronomers call the "Kuiper Belt," an area of small objects that stretches from Pluto outward and which is one of the outer layers of the solar system. It's named after astronomer Gerard Kuiper. It's not the most distant group of objects in the solar system, though. That would be the Oort Cloud, which is a still-hypothetical sphere of small icy objects thought to be a possible source for comets. The Oort cloud, if it exists, is thought to be between two thousand and five thousand times as far from the sun as is the Earth.

While 2014 MU69, discovered by Hubble telescope researchers last year, is not quite that far away, it is still a billion miles more distant than Pluto and New Horizons won't reach it until January 2019. Except for course corrections, regular systems checks and the completion of downloading all of the data it gathered from Pluto, scientists plan to put the probe to sleep for the journey. They say this is to conserve energy, but it may also be to forestall three and a half years of "Are we there yet?"