![](http://s32.postimg.org/4up9e6epw/Kuiper_belt.jpg"){kind=small}
Posted on 05/06/2016 6:37:23 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Known as 2014 MU69, the object is thought to be unchanged since the birth of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago....
... Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel submitted plans last month to NASA to fly past the relatively tiny chunk of icy matter on New Year's Day 2019. If NASA approves it, the extended New Horizon mission could give a close-up view of what has so far only appeared to scientists as a faint dot of light.
...
The object is in a 300-year orbit around the sun in the Kuiper Belt, a region of space beyond Neptune believed to contain small bodies made largely of ice.
Some of those bodies have been knocked into orbits that take them into the inner solar system (including the likes of Halley's Comet), and that exposure to the sun's heat means they aren't quite as they were billions of years ago. Others, like Pluto, are close enough to Neptune that the planet influences their orbits. MU69 is thought to be part of a third category of Kuiper Belt objects that has remained far from interactions with other bodies. It will be more than 43 times the distance between the Earth and the sun when New Horizons passes.
...
New Horizons has two cameras on board to give a detailed view of 2014 MU69, which it will come four times closer to than the 7,700-mile distance from which it observed Pluto at its closest approach. That is in part because 2014 MU69 is much smaller — probably about 18 miles across, compared with 1,500-mile-wide Pluto.
"You have less real estate to deal with," Weaver said. "If you want to have hundreds of pixels across the surface and the body's only 30 kilometers across, you've got to get pretty close."
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
*ping (if you haven’t seen it already)*
If it hasn’t changed in billions of years why worry about it?
At least it’s not Muslim outreach.
Thanks! I hadn’t seen it or (if memory serves) heard about it prior to this.
Thanks fieldmarshaldj.
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We should launch the Muslims out to see the thing. Don’t be racis!
It’s probably the boundary marker. Everything sun ward of it belongs to humans.
A belt of De Kuyper sounds pretty good about now...
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