New Horizons conducts the first interstellar parallax experiment

For the first time, a spacecraft has sent back pictures of the sky from so far away that some stars appear to be in different positions than we'd see from Earth. More than four billion miles from home and speeding toward interstellar space, NASA's New Horizons has traveled so far that it now has a unique view of the nearest stars. "It's fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth," said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. "And that has allowed us to do something that had never been accomplished before - to see the nearest stars visibly displaced on the sky from the positions we see them on Earth." On April 22-23, the spacecraft turned its long-range telescopic camera to a pair of the "closest" stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, showing just how they appear in different places than we see from Earth. Scientists have long used this "parallax effect" - how a star appears to shift against its background when seen from different locations - to measure distances to stars. An easy way to see parallax is to place one finger at arm's length and watch it jump back and forth when you view it successively with each eye. Similarly, as Earth makes it way around the Sun, the stars shift their positions. But because even the nearest stars are hundreds of thousands of times farther away than the diameter of Earth's orbit, the parallax shifts are tiny, and can only be measured with precise instrumentation.

"No human eye can detect these shifts," Stern said.

But when New Horizons images are paired with pictures of the same stars taken on the same dates by telescopes on Earth, the parallax shift is instantly visible. The combination yields a 3D view of the stars "floating" in front of their background star fields.

"The New Horizons experiment provides the largest parallax baseline ever made - over 4 billion miles - and is the first demonstration of an easily observable stellar parallax," said Tod Lauer, New Horizons science team member from the National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory who coordinated the parallax demonstration.

"The New Horizons spacecraft is truly a mission of firsts, and this demonstration of stellar parallax is no different" said Kenneth Hansen, New Horizons program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The New Horizons spacecraft continues to speed away from Earth toward interstellar space and is continuing to return exciting new data for planetary science."

Working in Stereo
Lauer, New Horizons Deputy Project Scientist John Spencer, of SwRI, and science team collaborator, astrophysicist, Queen guitarist and stereo imaging enthusiast Brian May created the images that clearly show the effect of the vast distance between Earth and the two nearby stars.

"It could be argued that in astro-stereoscopy - 3D images of astronomical objects - NASA's New Horizons team already leads the field, having delivered astounding stereoscopic images of both Pluto and the remote Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth," May said. "But the latest New Horizons stereoscopic experiment breaks all records. These photographs of Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359 - stars that are well-known to amateur astronomers and science fiction aficionados alike - employ the largest distance between viewpoints ever achieved in 180 years of stereoscopy!"

The companion images of Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359 were provided by the Las Cumbres Observatory, operating a remote telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia, and astronomers John Kielkopf, University of Louisville, and Karen Collins, Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, operating a remote telescope at Mt. Lemmon Observatory in Arizona.

"The professional and amateur astronomy communities had been waiting to try this, and were very excited to make a little space exploration history," said Lauer. "The images collected on Earth when New Horizons was observing Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359 really exceeded my expectations."

Download the images (and learn more about creating and posting your own parallax perspectives) at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Learn/Parallax/Parallax-Images.php

An Interstellar Navigation First
Throughout history, navigators have used measurements of the stars to establish their position on Earth. Interstellar navigators can do the same to establish their position in the galaxy, using a technique that New Horizons has demonstrated for the first time. While radio tracking by NASA's Deep Space Network is far more accurate, its first use is a significant milestone in what may someday become human exploration of the galaxy.

At the time of the observations, New Horizons was more than 4.3 billion miles (about 7 billion kilometers) from Earth, where a radio signal, traveling at the speed of light, needed just under 6 hours and 30 minutes to reach home.

Launched in 2006, New Horizons is the first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. It explored Pluto and its moons in July 2015 - completing the space-age reconnaissance of the planets that started 50 years earlier - and continued on its unparalleled voyage of exploration with the close flyby of Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth in January 2019. New Horizons will eventually leave the solar system, joining the Voyagers and Pioneers on their paths to the stars.

New Horizons pushing the frontier ever deeper into the Kuiper Belt

New Horizons is healthy and performing perfectly as it flies deeper and deeper into the Kuiper Belt! Recently we conducted an engineering review of the spacecraft to "trend" how it was working compared to when it was launched. The result was amazing: Every system and science instrument aboard New Horizons is working as well as it did when we lifted off, more than 14 years and almost 5 billion miles ago. As mission principal investigator I could not be prouder - the men and women who designed, built and tested New Horizons literally created a masterpiece of American workmanship that will likely be able to perform and explore for many more years and many more miles! Before I update you on mission news, I want to highlight something cool on our mission website. There's a crazy amount of detail there for anyone interested in knowing more about the New Horizons mission and our scientific discoveries, but we've also posted a file to create 3D spacecraft models. With this file anyone with access to a 3D printer can create their own New Horizons to have at home or at work! Now for some mission happenings, starting with a cool public engagement project we're doing this month and next. As I mentioned, New Horizons is almost 5 billion miles from Earth. That is so far away, that the very closest stars appear in different positions in the sky than they do from Earth. This is due to the different perspective New Horizons has of these stars from its far away perch.

On April 22 and 23, New Horizons will image two of the closest stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolfe 359. Here on Earth, astronomical observatories and amateur observers will simultaneously take images of the same stars. Using software to combine imagery from the spacecraft and the ground, we'll be able to produce stereo images of these star fields showing each star "popping out" because of the "parallax," or changed perspective, between Earth and New Horizons.

Nothing like this has ever been accomplished before! We'll release these 3D images in May, so stay tuned. But in the meantime, details on how you can take part in this experiment are on the mission website.

My first mission news update is that this summer, we'll be using a trio of the largest telescopes on Earth, specifically, the Japanese Subaru telescope, and the U.S. Gemini and Keck telescopes to discover new Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) for New Horizons to study. We expect to literally find hundreds of new KBOs! Most of these will be too far to study from New Horizons, but a few dozen will be close enough for the spacecraft to image.

Although the objects will just be points of light in the distance, millions or even tens of millions of miles from our spacecraft, New Horizons images will be valuable for studying their surface properties, their satellite systems, their shapes and their rotations in ways that cannot be accomplished from Earth - owing to their great distance and our limited viewing angles from the inner solar system.

New Horizons has been conducting studies of KBOs like this since 2016, but we've only been able to find and study about 20 so far. With discoveries from the Gemini, Subaru and Keck telescopes, we hope to triple or even quadruple that number, greatly enhancing our scientific return from the Kuiper Belt.

We will also scour the set of newly discovered KBOs for any that New Horizons might be able to fly by, as we did with the KBO Arrokoth early last year. Computer models indicate the probability of finding another close flyby target is small, because we have so little fuel on board to divert toward such a flyby - but that won't stop us from looking! Our fondest hope is that we get lucky and have the opportunity for one more close flyby of a KBO. After all, no other spacecraft is exploring (or ever has explored) the Kuiper Belt, and none are on the drawing board to do so. This is humankind's best chance to get such a close up of another KBO for decades to come!

I also want to update you on another cool development for the mission: We are looking at how to increase the capabilities of New Horizons' instrument payload through software upgrades. The team is evaluating several cost and capability- increase options for six of the seven instruments, and we expect to decide which ones to implement in May. By about this time next year, these "flight software" changes will be made, tested and sent to New Horizons for us to begin using those new capabilities. Later this year, once we've selected which enhancements to implement, I'll describe each of them.

I'll close with some scientific news. First, I want to announce the forthcoming publication late this year or early next of a 1,000-plus page technical research volume called The Pluto System After New Horizons. This book, to be published in the distinguished University of Arizona Space Science Series, will contain 24 chapters detailing essentially every aspect of what was learned about Pluto and its moons from the historic first-ever flyby exploration of Pluto, which New Horizons conducted in July 2015.

All 24 chapters are now written, each by a team of scientific experts. Some have already completed review by other scientists to improve them, while others are undergoing that step. By May or June, we expect all 24 chapters to be in production for publication. The book should then be published about six months later.

The other science news I want to relay is about a blockbuster discovery this mission made as a result of its close flyby of the Arrokoth. We published the first indications of this discovery in the esteemed research journal Science in 2019; a much deeper analysis confirming the early results was published in Science this February. The discovery is about how Arrokoth, and by inference most other primordial "planetesimals" (or planetary building blocks), came into existence.

For many years, two competing mathematical models of planetesimal formation existed. The data from New Horizons shows, definitely, that only one of these models - variously called the "streaming instability" or "pebble cloud collapse" model - can produce an object like Arrokoth. Our evidence? The detailed shape, geology and alignment of the two halves, or "lobes" of Arrokoth.

The New Horizons images, compositional spectra, and color data on Arrokoth all point to this model being how Arrokoth formed. We summarized this discovery in a Feb. 13 press release. This may be the single most impactful discovery of the entire New Horizons mission so far, pointing to how planets got their start while settling what has literally been a decades-long computer modeling duel between competing theories.

And with that big news, I'll conclude this report. I'll write again this summer. Meanwhile, I hope you'll keep on exploring - just as we do!

SwRI-led New Horizons research indicates small Kuiper Belt objects are surprisingly rare

Using New Horizons data from the Pluto-Charon flyby in 2015, a Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists have indirectly discovered a distinct and surprising lack of very small objects in the Kuiper Belt. The evidence for the paucity of small Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) comes from New Horizons imaging that revealed a dearth of small craters on Pluto's largest satellite, Charon, indicating that impactors from 300 feet to 1 mile (91 meters to 1.6 km) in diameter must also be rare. The Kuiper Belt is a donut-shaped region of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. Because small Kuiper Belt objects were some of the "feedstock" from which planets formed, this research provides new insights into how the solar system originated. This research was published in the March 1 issue of the prestigious journal Science. "These smaller Kuiper Belt objects are much too small to really see with any telescopes at such a great distance," said SwRI's Dr. Kelsi Singer, the paper's lead author and a co-investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission. "New Horizons flying directly through the Kuiper Belt and collecting data there was key to learning about both large and small bodies of the Belt." "This breakthrough discovery by New Horizons has deep implications," added the mission's principal investigator, Dr. Alan Stern, also of SwRI. "Just as New Horizons revealed Pluto, its moons, and more recently, the KBO nicknamed Ultima Thule in exquisite detail, Dr. Singer's team revealed key details about the population of KBOs at scales we cannot come close to directly seeing from Earth."

Craters on solar system objects record the impacts of smaller bodies, providing hints about the history of the object and its place in the solar system. Because Pluto is so far from Earth, little was known about the dwarf planet's surface until the epic 2015 flyby.

Observations of the surfaces of Pluto and Charon revealed a variety of features, including mountains that reach as high as 13,000 feet (4 km) and vast glaciers of nitrogen ice. Geologic processes on Pluto have erased or altered some of the evidence of its impact history, but Charon's relative geologic stasis has provided a more stable record of impacts.

"A major part of the mission of New Horizons is to better understand the Kuiper Belt," said Singer, whose research background studying the geology of the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter positions her to understand the surface processes seen on KBOs.

"With the successful flyby of Ultima Thule early this year, we now have three distinct planetary surfaces to study. This paper uses the data from the Pluto-Charon flyby, which indicate fewer small impact craters than expected. And preliminary results from Ultima Thule support this finding."

Typical planetary models show that 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system formed from the gravitational collapse of a giant molecular cloud. The Sun, the planets and other objects formed as materials within the collapsing cloud clumped together in a process known as accretion. Different models result in different populations and locations of objects in the solar system.

"This surprising lack of small KBOs changes our view of the Kuiper Belt and shows that either its formation or evolution, or both, were somewhat different than those of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter," said Singer.

"Perhaps the asteroid belt has more small bodies than the Kuiper Belt because its population experiences more collisions that break up larger objects into smaller ones."

Evidence for ancient glaciation on Pluto

A letter authored by SETI Institute scientist Oliver White was published by Nature Astronomy today. Co-authors included researchers Jeff Moore, Tanguy Bertrand and Kimberly Ennico at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. The letter "Washboard and Fluted Terrains on Pluto as Evidence for Ancient Glaciation" focuses on these distinctive landscapes that border the vast nitrogen ice plains of Sputnik Planitia along its northwest margin (Figure 1) and which are amongst the most enigmatic landforms yet seen on Pluto. These terrains consist of parallel to sub-parallel ridges that display a remarkably consistent ENE-WSW orientation, a configuration that does not readily point to a simple analogous terrestrial or planetary process or landform. The aim of Dr. White's research is to use mapping and analysis of the morphometry (the process of measuring the external shape and dimensions of landforms) and distribution of the ridges to determine their origin and to understand their significance within the overall geologic history of Pluto. The work used imaging data returned by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto in 2015, as well as topographic maps generated from this data. Washboard and fluted ridges are defined primarily by their topographic context: washboard ridges occur in level settings within valley floors, basins and uplands, whereas fluted ridges are seen on steeper spurs, massifs (or compact group of mountains) and crater walls that separate basins and valleys.

The washboard and fluted terrain is seen up close in Figure 2, in which illumination is from the top. They occur at the location on Sputnik Planitia's perimeter where elevations and slopes leading into the surrounding uplands are lowest, and also where a major tectonic system coincides with the edge of Sputnik Planitia.

The low elevation of the area makes it a natural setting for past coverage by nitrogen ice glaciers, as indicated by modeling of volatile behavior on Pluto performed by Dr. Bertrand at Ames. Through comparison of the washboard and fluted texture with parallel chains of elongated sublimation pits (depressions in the surface formed where ice turns directly into a gas) seen in southern Sputnik Planitia, the ridges are interpreted to represent water ice debris liberated by tectonism of underlying crust.

This water ice debris was buoyant in the denser, pitted glacial nitrogen ice that is interpreted to have formerly covered this area, and collected on the floors of the elongated pits. After the nitrogen ice receded via sublimation, the debris was left as the aligned ridges, mimicking the sublimation texture - washboard ridges where deposited on flat terrain, and fluted ridges where deposited on steeper slopes.

Crater surface age estimates indicate that the washboard and fluted ridges were deposited early in Pluto's history, after formation of the Sputnik basin by a giant impact ~4 billion years ago. Acting as a giant cold trap, it was to this basin that surface nitrogen ice across Pluto migrated over some tens of millions of years, thereby causing the recession of nitrogen glaciers from upland areas such as that now occupied by the washboard and fluted terrain.

The precise mechanism that elongated the sublimation pits and defined their strikingly consistent orientation regardless of latitude or location relative to Sputnik Planitia is elusive, but is consistent with a global-scale process.

A constraint is that true polar wander solutions for Pluto (provided by co-author Dr. James Keane of Caltech) indicate that the ridges can never have all been oriented N-S at any time in Pluto's history. This suggests a cause for the alignment that is not exogenic (i.e. the orientation is likely not governed solely by solar illumination, which would cause all the sublimation pits to align N-S).

Dr. White summarizes the findings as follows: "These terrains constitute an entirely new category of glacial landform that is unique to Pluto, and represent geological evidence that nitrogen ice glaciation was more widespread across Pluto in its early history prior to the formation of the Sputnik basin. The dense spacing of the ridges allows us to precisely map out the past coverage of the glaciation that deposited them, which extended across at least 70,000 km^2 of Pluto's uplands (larger than the state of West Virginia)."

The True Colors of Pluto and Charon

Three years after NASA's New Horizons spacecraft gave humankind our first close-up views of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, scientists are still revealing the wonders of these incredible worlds in the outer solar system. Marking the anniversary of New Horizons' historic flight through the Pluto system on July 14, 2015, mission scientists have released the most accurate natural color images of Pluto and Charon. These natural-color images result from refined calibrations of data gathered by New Horizons' Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). "That processing creates images that would approximate the colors that the human eye would perceive - bringing them closer to 'true color' than the images released near the encounter," said Alex Parker, a New Horizons science team co-investigator from Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado. Because MVIC's color filters don't closely match the wavelengths sensed by human vision, mission scientists applied special processing to translate the raw MVIC data into an estimate of the colors that the eye would see. The colors are more subdued than those constructed from the raw MVIC color data, because of the narrower wavelength range sensed by the human eye.

Both images were taken as New Horizons zipped toward closest approach to Pluto and its moons on July 14, 2015; Charon was taken from a range of 46,091 miles (74,176 kilometers) and Pluto from 22,025 miles (35,445 kilometers).

Each is a single color MVIC scan, with no data from other New Horizons imagers or instruments added. The striking features on each are clearly visible, from Charon's reddish north-polar region known as Mordor Macula, to the bright expanse of Pluto's, nitrogen-and-methane-ice rich "heart," named Sputnik Planitia.

Preparations are well underway for New Horizons' next encounter, a flyby of Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule, on Jan. 1, 2019 - a billion miles beyond Pluto. Currently about 3.8 billion miles (6.1 billion kilometers) from Earth - more than 40 times farther from the Sun than Earth - the spacecraft is operating normally and will begin making long-distance observations and measurements of Ultima in late August.

Added New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute: "Even as we celebrate the third anniversary of the historic exploration of the Pluto system - the most distant worlds ever explored - we're looking forward to the far more distant and record-shattering exploration of Ultima Thule, just five months from now!"

New Horizons Wakes for Historic Kuiper Belt Flyby

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is back "awake" and being prepared for the farthest planetary encounter in history - a New Year's Day 2019 flyby of the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule. Cruising through the Kuiper Belt more than 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from Earth, New Horizons had been in resource-saving hibernation mode since Dec. 21. Radio signals confirming that New Horizons had executed on-board computer commands to exit hibernation reached mission operations at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, via NASA's Deep Space Network at 2:12 a.m. EDT on June 5. Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman of APL reported that the spacecraft was in good health and operating normally, with all systems coming back online as expected. Over the next three days, the mission team will collect navigation tracking data (using signals from the Deep Space Network) and send the first of many commands to New Horizons' onboard computers to begin preparations for the Ultima flyby; lasting about two months, those flyby preparations include memory updates, Kuiper Belt science data retrieval, and a series of subsystem and science-instrument checkouts.

In August, the team will command New Horizons to begin making distant observations of Ultima, images that will help the team refine the spacecraft's course to fly by the object.

"Our team is already deep into planning and simulations of our upcoming flyby of Ultima Thule and excited that New Horizons is now back in an active state to ready the bird for flyby operations, which will begin in late August," said mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

New Horizons made a historic flight past Pluto and its moons on July 14, 2015, returning data that has transformed our view of these intriguing worlds near the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt. Since then, New Horizons has been speeding deeper into this distant region, observing other Kuiper Belt objects and measuring the properties of the heliosphere while heading toward the flyby of Ultima Thule - about a billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto - on Jan. 1, 2019.

New Horizons is now approximately 162 million miles (262 million kilometers) - less than twice the distance between Earth and the Sun - from Ultima, speeding 760,200 miles (1,223,420 kilometers closer each day. Follow New Horizons on its voyage at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Where-is-New-Horizons/index.php.

Long-Distance Numbers

On June 5, 2018, New Horizons was nearly 3.8 billion miles (6.1 billion kilometers) from Earth. From there - more than 40 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun - a radio signal sent from the spacecraft at light speed reached Earth 5 hours and 40 minutes later.

The 165-day hibernation that ended June 4 was the second of two such "rest" periods for the spacecraft before the Ultima Thule flyby. The spacecraft will now remain active until late 2020, after it has transmitted all data from the Ultima encounter back to Earth and completed other Kuiper Belt science observations.

New Horizons captures record-breaking images in the Kuiper Belt

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft recently turned its telescopic camera toward a field of stars, snapped an image - and made history. The routine calibration frame of the "Wishing Well" galactic open star cluster, made by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on Dec. 5, was taken when New Horizons was 3.79 billion miles (6.12 billion kilometers, or 40.9 astronomical units) from Earth - making it, for a time, the farthest image ever made from Earth. New Horizons was even farther from home than NASA's Voyager 1 when it captured the famous "Pale Blue Dot" image of Earth. That picture was part of a composite of 60 images looking back at the solar system, on Feb. 14, 1990, when Voyager was 3.75 billion miles (6.06 billion kilometers, or about 40.5 astronomical units [AU]) from Earth. Voyager 1's cameras were turned off shortly after that portrait, leaving its distance record unchallenged for more than 27 years. LORRI broke its own record just two hours later with images of Kuiper Belt objects 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85 - further demonstrating how nothing stands still when you're covering more than 700,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) of space each day.

Distance and Speed

New Horizons is just the fifth spacecraft to speed beyond the outer planets, so many of its activities set distance records. On Dec. 9 it carried out the most-distant course-correction maneuver ever, as the mission team guided the spacecraft toward a close encounter with a KBO named 2014 MU69 on Jan.

1, 2019. That New Year's flight past MU69 will be the farthest planetary encounter in history, happening one billion miles beyond the Pluto system - which New Horizons famously explored in July 2015.

During its extended mission in the Kuiper Belt, which began in 2017, New Horizons is aiming to observe at least two-dozen other KBOs, dwarf planets and "Centaurs," former KBOs in unstable orbits that cross the orbits of the giant planets.

Mission scientists study the images to determine the objects' shapes and surface properties, and to check for moons and rings. The spacecraft also is making nearly continuous measurements of the plasma, dust and neutral-gas environment along its path.

The New Horizons spacecraft is healthy and is currently in hibernation. Mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, will bring the spacecraft out of its electronic slumber on June 4 and begin a series of system checkouts and other activities to prepare New Horizons for the MU69 encounter.

Wrapping up 2017 one year out from MU69

New Horizons is in good health and cruising closer each day to its next encounter: a flyby of the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) 2014 MU69 (or "MU69" for short). If you follow our mission, you likely know that flyby will occur on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day 2019, which is just barely over a year from now! As I write this, New Horizons is wrapping up an active period that began when the spacecraft emerged from hibernation mode in September. But soon, on Dec. 21, we'll put the spacecraft back in hibernation, where it will remain until June 4, 2018. After June 4 the spacecraft will stay "awake" until late in 2020, long after the MU69 flyby, when all of the data from that flyby have reached Earth. But before we put New Horizons into hibernation this month, we have some important work ahead. We'll observe five more KBOs with the onboard LORRI telescope/imager to learn about their surface properties, satellite systems and rotation periods. This work is part of a larger set of observations of 25-35 Kuiper Belt objects from 2016 to 2020 on this extended mission. Learning about these KBOs from close range and at angles that we cannot observe from Earth makes will give us key context for the more detailed studies we'll make of MU69 from a thousand times closer than we can study any other KBO. In addition to that LORRI imaging of these objects, we're continuing our nearly round-the-clock observations of the charged particle and dust environment of the Kuiper Belt-both before and while New Horizons hibernates.

Also right ahead is a 2.5-minute engine burn planned for Dec. 9 (yes, a Saturday). This maneuver will both refine our course and optimize our flyby arrival time at MU69, by setting closest approach to 5:33 Universal Time (12:33 a.m. Eastern Standard Time) on Jan. 1, 2019.

Flying by at that time provides better visibility by the antennas of NASA's Deep Space Network, which will attempt to reflect radar waves off the surface of MU69 for New Horizons to receive. If it succeeds, that difficult experiment will help us determine the surface reflectivity and roughness of MU69 at radar wavelengths-something that has been successfully applied to study asteroids, comets, planetary satellites and even some planets, including Pluto, which New Horizons observed the same way in 2015.

Our Pluto observation set a record for the most distant object ever studied with radar -shattering the previous record by over 300 percent! If our radar experiment is successful on the much-smaller MU69 (which is perhaps 30 kilometers [19 miles] in diameter-tiny compared to Pluto's almost 2,400-kilometer [1,480-mile] diameter), then we'll break our own record, something unlikely to be surpassed for decades.

Since hibernating, New Horizons requires less attention from mission control than when we're in active operations. This will allow our mission team to focus fully on planning the detailed sequences that will tell New Horizons how to make every scientific observation of MU69 during its close-range pass in the days surrounding Jan. 1, 2019.

The year ahead will also include many observations of other KBOs, more study of the Sun's heliosphere with our dust and plasma instruments - SDC, PEPSSI, and SWAP, and our Alice ultraviolet spectrometer - as well as all the remaining flyby planning for MU69.

MU69 flyby operations will begin with distant navigation imaging to help us accurately home in on our target; that work will start in late August or September and will continue until literally 48 hours before flyby.

Our navigation teams at KinetX and NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab JPL will use those navigation images to compute the engine burns to further refine our course toward our planned closest approach point just 3,500 kilometers, or about 2,175 miles, from MU69. That's more than three times as close as we flew by Pluto, which should make for spectacular MU69 images and other data!

Additionally, beginning in the final weeks of 2018, we'll search for moons or dust structures around MU69 that could harm New Horizons if we were to collide with them during our 32,000-miles-per-hour flyby. If hazards that threaten the spacecraft are found, we can burn our engines to divert to a farther flyby, with a closest approach of 10,000 kilometers (about 6,200 miles), which should be safer.

Well, that's my update for now. For more mission news, stay tuned to NASA websites, our own project website, and our social media channels, which are listed below so you can bookmark them.

I'll write again early next year. Until then, I hope you have a safe and productive finish to 2017, a happy new year, and that you'll keep on exploring-just as we do!