NASA’s New Horizons Mission: New Observations Made About Pluto? New Target Identified?

NASA's New Horizons mission has reportedly not only made new observations about Pluto but also identified its next target, a world that has been observed by the Hubble Space Telescope to be as red as Pluto, if not redder. Called 2014 MU69, the celestial body is said to be located around 6.6 billion kilometers away the Sun, and New Horizons is scheduled to reach it on January 1, 2019.

"The reddish color tells us the type of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 is," researcher Amanda Zangari said. "The data confirms that on New Year's Day 2019, New Horizons will be looking at one of the ancient building blocks of the planets."

Pluto's reddish color has been attributed by scientists to the molecules called tholins, which are created when sunlight interacts with organic compounds like methane. Researchers feel the phenomenon could also explain the reddish tinge for 2014 MU69, an object that belongs to a region in the solar system that is full of dwarf planets, comets and asteroids beyond Neptune's orbit - called the Kuiper Belt. Furthermore, 2014 MU69 is reported to be the region's smallest object that has had its color measured.

Apart from proceeding towards its new target, the New Horizons mission is still relaying back data it had captured during the Pluto flyby, as a result of which scientists are continuously getting to know something new about the icy dwarf, and the process of discoveries is ongoing. A recent observation of newly transmitted data suggested the presence of numerous groups of clouds, which indicates that Pluto's atmosphere could be hiding something.  "If there are clouds, it would mean the weather on Pluto is even more complex than we imagined," New Horizons' principle investigator, Alan Stern said.

Furthermore, the researching team has also observed a lack of landsides on Pluto, a non occurrence which has baffled them particularly because such an activity has been noticed on the icy dwarf's moon Charon, as well as on other satellites and planets. The team wants to know if landslides will be detected on any of the objects in the Kuiper Belt. At the moment, New Horizon's is journeying 3.4 billion miles away from Earth at a speed of 8.7 miles per second.