The soon-to-be-famous object at the Solar System’s edge needs a name

Enlarge / One artist's concept of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, the next flyby target for NASA's New Horizons mission. (credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Alex Parker)

A boy named Sue. A girl named Beulah. These are some of the unfortunate names a child can have today. But such children have nothing to complain about in comparison to a cold, dark rock that is 6.5 billion kilometers from Earth. This object, no more than 30km long, has the most unfortunate of names-(486958) 2014 MU69.

And this just won't do. This large rock is about to become the second most famous object in the Kuiper Belt, which lies at the edge of the Solar System and is home to Pluto and a host of other similar sized dwarf planets and smaller objects. On January 1, 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by 2014 MU69, providing us with unprecedented information about smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt.

So NASA and the New Horizons science team need your help. They want to find a nickname for 2014 MU69 before the flyby, and they're holding a contest to do so. "We would like to use a more memorable nickname when we talk about our target body," wrote Mark Showalter, a SETI Institute scientist and member of the New Horizons science team, about the contest.

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