The Kuiper Belt is a distant region of the Solar System. On 1 January 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft flew close to (486958) 2014 MU69, a Cold Classical Kuiper Belt Object, a class of objects that have never been heated by the Sun and are therefore well preserved since their formation. Here we describe initial results from these encounter observations. MU69 is a bi-lobed contact binary with a flattened shape, discrete geological units, and noticeable albedo heterogeneity. However, there is little surface color and compositional heterogeneity. No evidence for satellites, ring or dust structures, gas coma, or solar wind interactions was detected. By origin MU69 appears consistent with pebble cloud collapse followed by a low velocity merger of its two lobes.
The Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper (LunaH-Map) mission will map the distribution of hydrogen around the lunar South Pole using a miniature neutron spectrometer. The mission builds upon a decade of lunar science, which has revealed both regional and more localized enrichments of water ice near the lunar poles. Localized enrichments are primarily within permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) and craters throughout the South Pole. The spatial extent of these regions is often below the resolution of previous neutron instruments that have flown on lunar missions. The neutron leakage spectrum from planetary surfaces is primarily sensitive to hydrogen abundance in the top meter of regolith, however, for neutron spectrometers with omnidirectional sensitivity, the spatial resolution is limited by the spacecraft orbital altitude above the surface. A low altitude measurement from a distance on the same scale of the PSRs could spatially isolate and constrain the hydrogen enrichments both within and around within those regions. A small spacecraft mission is ideally suited to acquire the low-altitude measurements required to localize hydrogen enrichments using neutron spectroscopy at the lunar South Pole. LunaH-Map will use a solid iodine ion propulsion system, X-Band radio communications through the NASA Deep Space Network, star tracker, Command & Data Handling System, and EPS systems from Blue Canyon Technologies, solar arrays from MMA Designs, LLC, mission design and navigation by KinetX. Spacecraft systems design, integration, qualification, test, and mission operations are performed by Arizona State University, AZ Space Technologies and Qwaltec.
