After NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft successfully did a flyby of Pluto last month, the mission team has now been tasked with another assignment: to deploy the probe to another body called 2014 MU69 – situated one billion miles from Pluto on the Kuiper Belt.

PT 1 was one of five potential KBOs discovered via the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014 after a search started three years earlier had failed to find any targets the spacecraft could reach with its limited fuel supply. It has brought forth details that will revolutionize many sciences, revealed the dwarf planet’s face at a distance shorter than ever before, limning the characteristics of its landscapes and that of its moons.

Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft, now some 56 million kilometers beyond Pluto, and 4.9 billion kilometers from Earth, will head for a mysterious 45 kilometer wide object floating in the icy Kuiper Belt. With this knowledge, we may be able to draw more precise conclusions as to our solar system’s past, and we might just be able to infer about its future.

Stuart Robbins, the NASA scientist who created the video, writes on a blog that he made several tweaks to the timescale and other variables to improve its cinematic quality.

“Even as the New Horizon’s spacecraft speeds away from Pluto out into the Kuiper Belt, and the data from the exciting encounter with this new world is being streamed back to Earth, we are looking outward to the next destination for this intrepid explorer”, said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and chief of the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency headquarters in Washington. “This KBO costs less fuel to reach [than other candidate targets], leaving more fuel for the flyby, for ancillary science, and greater fuel reserves to protect against the unforeseen”.

Artist’s concept of New Horizons nearing Pluto. The agency will conduct a review process before it approves an extension and the New Horizons team must also submit a proposal for 2014 MU69. That proposal will then be evaluated by a group of experts chosen by NASA, who will decide whether it should be approved and funded.

The first close-up image of Pluto released by NASA from the New Horizons mission. The spacecraft’s power system will function for a long time, and its communications system was constructed to operate far beyond Pluto.