New Horizon's is halfway to its next flyby target

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Continuing on its path through the outer regions of the solar system, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has now traveled half the distance from Pluto – its storied first target – to 2014 MU69, the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) it will fly past on Jan. 1, 2019. The spacecraft reached that milestone at midnight (UTC) on April 3 – or 8 p.m. ET on April 2 – when it was 486.19 million miles (782.45 million kilometers) beyond Pluto and the same distance from MU69.

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New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe that was launched as a part of NASA's New Frontiers program.[2] Engineered by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), with a team led by S. Alan Stern,[3] the spacecraft was launched in 2006 with the primary mission to perform a flyby study of the Pluto system in 2015, and a secondary mission to fly by and study one or more other Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) in the decade to follow.[4][5][6][7][8]

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(486958) 2014 MU69 (initially called PT1 and 1110113Y by the New Horizons and Hubble teams, respectively) is a classical Kuiper belt object. It is the target for the New Horizons probe for a flyby on 1 January 2019, after its Pluto flyby.[3] It was selected as New Horizons' target in August 2015.[8] After four course changes in October and November 2015, New Horizons is on course toward 2014 MU69.[9][10]

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