This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

When we were first proposing the mission, NASA called for not just to fly by a Pluto, but further study of ancient

Kuiper belt objects, the building blocks of the small planets of the solar

system. And so we designed the spacecraft to be able to do that.

Alan Stern, principal investigator of NASA's New Horizons

mission that zipped past Pluto July 14th. He spoke October 11th at the Science Writers

2015 meeting on the campus of MIT.

Now we have to go to NASA with a funding proposal

to make this real, but we've already found our targets.

The extended mission that we plan to fly that we will propose next spring to NASA will result in a fly-by of a small

Kuiper belt object on January 1st, 2019. We found these targets with the Hubble Space Telescope. They're very

faint. They're very hard to do. You can't find them from the ground. We had five

potential targets. We ended up selecting the one that we want to fly to in August,

and in fact in just over two weeks we'll be firing the engines on New Horizons to retarget in that direction.

For that flyby, it doesn't have a real name yet, just a license plate. It's called

2014-M-U 69. I promise we'll do better before the fly-by.

But this is going to be a really fascinating target

scientifically because this is an object about 10 times bigger and a

thousand times more massive than the comet that Rosetta is orbiting.

And that comet, by the way, is from the Kuiper belt.

It just came down into the inner solar system due to orbital dynamics.

And this object that we're going to fly by is also about a thousand times less

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