Nasa asks for help to name distant object

UNITED STATES: Nasa’s New Horizons probe has a New Year’s Day date with a faint, oddly shaped, ice-covered object 6.4 billion km away.

The intrepid spacecraft has been sailing through the cold void of space for more than a decade, and it hasn’t had a close encounter with another object since it left Pluto in 2015. For more than two years, but for a few distant glimpses of rocks hundreds of millions of kilometres away, all New Horizons has had to look forward to is this rendezvous at the solar system’s outermost edge.

When the probe zips past the object on January 1, 2019, it will become the most distant object ever to be explored by a spacecraft. There’s only one problem - it doesn’t have a name.

Right now, it goes by (486958) 2014 MU69, an unwieldy amalgam that indicates its number in the minor-planet catalogue and when it was found. Alan Stern, the principal investigator for New Horizons, called that name a ‘‘licence plate designator’’.

Nasa has set up an online cam- paign to solicit nicknames for the object. The space agency started things off with a few suggestions, including ‘‘Pluck’’ and the names of several types of nut.

‘‘A contact binary is often shaped like a peanut,’’ Nasa explains. ‘‘If other bodies are found, we can name them after the type of nut they most closely resemble.’’

People can submit suggestions to frontierworlds.org or vote for one of the names already being considered. Polls close on December 1.

To ensure it doesn’t become another Boaty McBoatface situation, Nasa hasn’t guaranteed that it will go with the most popular option. Instead, the agency and the New Horizons team will review the names with the most votes and choose their favourite.

Nasa doesn’t know much about (486958) 2014 MU69. It is a Kuiper Belt object - an inhabitant of the wide, frozen disk of debris that encircles the outer solar system - and was discovered in 2014 during a Hubble Space Telescope survey.

– Washington Post