NASA’s New Horizons has got another feather in its proverbial cap by completing a record-setting targeting manoeuvre that has set it on course to meet a space object in the Kuiper Belt. The probe will have a potential encounter with an ancient space object 2014 MU69 in January 2019. This body in the Kuiper Belt is over 1.6 billion kilometres from Pluto, to be explored upon approval of an extended mission from NASA.

NASA’s Pluto exploration programme has been making headlines for quite some time. Now, a set of four propulsive manoeuvres completed on Nov 4 have set the record for being the most distant trajectory corrections ever performed by a spacecraft. The manoeuvres “pushed” New Horizons sideways, powerfully nudging it at 57 metres per second towards the Kuiper Belt object (KBO), explains a NASA press release. The spacecraft is now forecast to intercept MU69 in a little more than three years.

The first three manoeuvres were executed on Oct 22, 25 and 28. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft was approximately 5.1 billion kilometres away from the Earth and 135 million kilometres beyond Pluto at the time of the last course-correction on Nov 4.

Curt Niebur, New Horizons programme scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said, “This is another milestone in the life of an already successful mission that's returning exciting new data every day,” in the press release. “These course adjustments preserve the option of studying an even more distant object in the future, as New Horizons continues its remarkable journey.”

Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and New Horizons principal investigator, was positive about 2014 MU69 being selected as a KBO. “2014 MU69 is a great choice because it is just the kind of ancient KBO, formed where it orbits now, that the Decadal Survey desired us to fly by,” he said in a NASA press release in August 2015. “Moreover, this KBO costs less fuel to reach than other candidate targets, leaving more fuel for the flyby, for ancillary science, and greater fuel reserves to protect against the unforeseen.”

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