Surprise! New Horizons Probe's Next Flyby Target Has at Least One Moon

By Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com Contributor | December 18, 2017 07:20am ET


NEW ORLEANS — When NASA's New Horizons spacecraft arrives at its next destination in 2019, it may find more primordial objects than NASA had anticipated: Researchers have announced that the probe's next target, an icy object known as 2014 MU69, may have at least one moon and could even host a swarm of natural satellites.

"It is very exciting," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado, told Space.com. Stern and his colleagues chased 2014 MU69 on land and through the air last summer as it occulted, or passed in front of, three background stars. The results suggest that the distant object has at least one moon, said the scientists who presented the results here yesterday (Dec. 12) at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting.

"This might be the harbinger," Stern said during a news conference at the AGU meeting. "It might hint that there is actually a swarm of satellites from MU69." [Wow! See New Horizons' Next Flyby Target Blot Out a Star's Light]

After New Horizons slipped by Pluto in July 2015, it continued on through the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy objects beyond Neptune. The team quickly obtained permission to embark on an extended mission, with MU69 as its selected target.

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