If you ’ve been following the New Horizon mission after Pluto , you ’ll know it ’s on its way to an asteroid in the outer Solar System . And now NASA has revealed what the spacecraft will be doing when it arrives in 2019 .

That asteroid is promise MU69 , cogitate to be a remnant of the former Solar System . It orbits the Sun about 1.5 billion kilometers ( 1 billion mile ) from Pluto , and 6.5 billion kilometers ( 4 billion miles ) from Earth .

New Horizons is schedule to fell past MU69 on January 1 , 2019 . fit in to the plan , the spacecraft will come within just 3,500 kilometers ( 2,175 miles ) of the control surface , which is more than three time snug than it become to Pluto .

A contingency plan , if rubble is pick up around the humble object , would see New Horizons approach to 12,500 km ( 7,800 air mile ) .

“ The total skirmish will last Sep 2018 to Jan 2019 , ” New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern told IFLScience . “ The closemouthed approach and detailed imaging though is Dec 30 to Jan 2 . "

If the close flyby go forward , the spacecraft will be able to see detail as small-scale as 70 meters ( 230 substructure ) on the surface of MU69 . On Pluto , it could decide details of about 183 m ( 600 foot ) . So expect to see some rather sensational imagination .

“ We ’re design to fly closer to MU69 than Pluto to get even high resolution imaging and other datasets , ” Stern state in astatement . “ The scientific discipline should be spectacular . ”

precisely what MU69 will look like is n’t clear yet , but we ’re starting to get a better idea . This was thanks to the pocket-sized objective passingin front of a stara couple of calendar month ago relative to Earth . scientist then studied the darkness of the object as it passed over Earth .

Those subject suggest the object ( which has a reddish chromaticity ) may in reality be abinary , two smaller objects orbiting near to each other . If it ’s a single object , it may be about 30 kilometre ( 20 miles ) long . If it ’s a double object , each is thought to be 15 to 20 kilometers ( 9 to 12 miles ) in diam .

Further detail will be arduous to come by until New Horizons gets close . Like the flyby of Pluto , we ’ll simply have to waitress and see what secrets this unexplored body of the Solar System holds .