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Following its historic first-ever flyby of Pluto, NASAs New Horizons mission has received the green light to fly onward to an object deeper in the Kuiper Belt, known as 2014 MU69.The spacecrafts planned rendezvous with the ancient object considered one of the early building blocks of the solar system -- is Jan. 1, 2019.
The New Horizons mission to Pluto exceeded our expectations and even today the data from the spacecraft continue to surprise, said NASAs Director of Planetary Science Jim Green. Were excited to continue onward into the dark depths of the outer solar system to a science target that wasnt even discovered when the spacecraft launched.
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But thats not the only object New Horizons will study during the mission extension. As it travels to 2014 MU69, the spacecraft will be observing about two dozen other objects located in the Kuiper Belt. That includes Eris, the second largest dwarf planet in the region after Pluto. "We can take pictures of Eris, even though were further from it than we would be if we had stayed on Earth," John Spencer, a New Horizons team member and scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, told The Verge. "But were looking at it from a unique angle you could never see from Earth, because the Earth is so close to the Sun."