Home NASA NASA Wants Your Help Nicknaming Planet (486958) 2014 MU69 (Video)

NASA Wants Your Help Nicknaming Planet (486958) 2014 MU69 (Video)

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Planet (486958) 2014 MU69 (Image: NASA)

Sure naming your pet fish or new puppy is pretty fun, but NASA is giving you a chance to name a tiny ice world on the edge of our solar system. Buzz60’s Josh King has more.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which famously flew by Pluto in 2015, is now heading toward a very old, icy object at the edge of the Solar System — and the space agency wants your help in giving this world a new nickname.

The probe’s new destination is an object in the Kuiper Belt — the large cloud of small bodies that orbit beyond Neptune — and the space rock’s name is, to put it bluntly, a mess. The official title is (486958) 2014 MU69, a bunch of numbers that ultimately refer to when the object was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a bit of a nightmare to type and say out loud, so having a more eloquent nickname will be much more fun and incredibly helpful.

[vc_btn title=”Continue reading” style=”outline” color=”black” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2F2017%2F11%2F6%2F16614722%2Fnasa-new-horizons-spacecraft-pluto-2014-mu69-nickname-flyby|title:Continue%20reading|target:%20_blank|”][vc_message message_box_style=”outline” message_box_color=”black”]TheVerge, excerpt posted on  SouthFloridaReporter.com, Nov. 9, 2017 

Video by Buzz60/Josh King[/vc_message]

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