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.
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