Artist’s impression of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft encountering a Kuiper Belt object, as part of an extended mission after the spacecraft’s July 2015 Pluto flyby. New Horizons is set to fly past 2014 MU69 – a KBO currently about a billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto – on Jan. 1, 2019. Recent data from the Hubble Space Telescope suggests 2014 MU69 has a reddish hue, even redder than Pluto. The object is the smallest KBO to have its surface properties measured. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
Members of NASA’s New Horizons team will discuss the achievements of the first encounter with Pluto and look ahead to the mission’s next exploration of the Kuiper Belt during a Facebook Live event at 4 p.m. EST on Thursday, Jan. 19 — the 11th anniversary of the spacecraft’s launch.
The event, live-streamed from New Horizons mission operations at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, will be available on the NASA New Horizons Facebook page at:
The conversation will cover a range of topics, including the top three findings from the spacecraft’s Pluto flyby and what New Horizons is doing on the way to its next science target.
Team members scheduled to appear are:
- Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters
- Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute
- Glen Fountain, New Horizons (encounter) project manager at APL
- Kelsi Singer, New Horizons co-investigator at Southwest Research Institute
- Helene Winters, New Horizons project manager at APL
The team will answer questions from the public during the live event. Media may submit questions before and during the event by emailing Laurie Cantillo at NASA Headquarters, laura.l.cantillo@nasa.gov.
New Horizons team members also will be available for interviews through Friday, Jan. 20. Media should contact Michael Buckley in APL Public Affairs at (240) 228-7536 or michael.buckley@jhuapl.edu to arrange interviews with the team.
All data from New Horizons’ flight through the Pluto system in July 2015 has been transmitted safely to Earth, with the last bits arriving last fall. While the team continues to analyze this historic set of images and other materials, it’s planning for the spacecraft’s next encounter – a flyby of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, on Jan. 1, 2019.
For information about NASA’s New Horizons mission, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons
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Dwayne Brown / Laurie Cantillo
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726 / 202-358-1077
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov / laura.l.cantillo@nasa.gov
Michael Buckley
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.
240-228-7536
michael.buckley@jhuapl.edu