Published May 17, 2019
| public
Journal Article
Initial results from the New Horizons exploration of 2014 MU_(69), a small Kuiper Belt object
- Creators
- Stern, S. A.
-
Keane, J. T.
Abstract
After flying past Pluto in 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft shifted course to encounter (486958) 2014 MU_(69), a much smaller body about 30 kilometers in diameter. MU_(69) is part of the Kuiper Belt, a collection of small icy bodies orbiting in the outer Solar System. Stern et al.present the initial results from the New Horizons flyby of MU_(69) on 1 January 2019. MU_(69) consists of two lobes that appear to have merged at low speed, producing a contact binary. This type of Kuiper Belt object is mostly undisturbed since the formation of the Solar System and so will preserve clues about that process.
Additional Information
© 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science. This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License. Received 20 February 2019; accepted 16 April 2019. We thank all ~2500 present and past New Horizons team members, NASA and its Deep Space Network, KinetX Aerospace Corporation, the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the European Space Agency Gaia and NASA HST space missions for their contributions to making the flyby of MU_(69) successful; our NASA Headquarters Program Scientist, C. Niebur; and J. Anderson of the Space Telescope Science Institute. We also thank NASA Administrator J. Bridenstine for his key support during the December 2018 to January 2019 partial U.S. government shutdown; SwRI President A. Hamilton and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory Director R. Semmel for many years of valuable project support; and three anonymous referees for their helpful contributions to this paper. We acknowledge the contributions of our late team members Thomas Coughlin, Robert Farquhar, William Gibson, Lisa Hardaway, and David C. Slater. Funding: Supported by NASA's New Horizons project via contracts NASW-02008 and NAS5-97271/TaskOrder30. Also supported by the National Research Council of Canada (J.J.K.). Author contributions: S.A.S., J.R.S., J.M.M., O.L.W., W.B.M., W.M.G., G.R.G., and H.A.E. were responsible for drafting this manuscript. S.A.S. is the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission. All other authors participated in mission planning, mission operations, mission engineering, mission management, mission public affairs, or science data reduction or analysis, and/or provided inputs and critique to this manuscript. Competing interests: We declare no competing interests. Data and materials availability: All images, spacecraft data, and the shape model used in this paper are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7940630. Additional fully calibrated New Horizons MU_(69) data and higher-order data products will be released by the NASA Planetary Data System at https://pds-smallbodies.astro.umd.edu/data_sb/missions/newhorizons/index.shtml in a series of stages in 2020 and 2021, owing to the time required to fully downlink and calibrate the dataset.Additional details
- Alternative title
- Initial results from the New Horizons exploration of 2014 MU69, a small Kuiper Belt object
- Eprint ID
- 95549
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20190516-153626168
- NASW-02008
- NASA
- NAS5-97271
- NASA
- TaskOrder30
- NASA
- National Research Council of Canada
- Created
-
2019-05-17Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2023-06-01Created from EPrint's last_modified field