NASA wants the internet to nickname a distant object 1 billion miles past Pluto
Alright, folks. NASA needs our help.
The space agency is asking people on the internet — yes, that means you — to help it select a fun nickname for a pretty dryly named but still important object: (486958) 2014 MU69.
MU69 is an object — or possibly two objects — floating in the Kuiper belt, Pluto's part of space which is filled with small objects left over from the dawn of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.
Scientists need a nickname for MU69 because it's going to get a lot of attention in the coming years.
On Jan. 1, 2019, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft — which flew past Pluto in July 2015 — will fly by MU69, taking an up-close look at a world (or worlds) never seen in detail before.
In light of that fact, NASA is asking people to nominate nicknames for MU69 and vote for their favorites.
At the time of writing, Mjölnir (the mythical name for Thor's hammer) is winning, with 1219 votes.
(My personal favorite name, Z'ha'dum — a terrifying, fictional planet at the border of the galaxy in the criminally underrated show Babylon 5 — is coming in at number three right now.)
“New Horizons made history two years ago with the first close-up look at Pluto, and is now on course for the farthest planetary encounter in the history of spaceflight,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. “We’re pleased to bring the public along on this exciting mission of discovery.”
And the public is probably pleased too.
The internet has an interesting track record when it comes to naming important objects. Does Boaty McBoatface ring a bell to anyone?
It's true that NASA may not have been thinking about some of the more ill-advised internet naming schemes in recent years, but there are some safeguards in place to assure that the agency won't end up calling MU69 Plutoy McPlutoface or something like that.
"The New Horizons team and NASA will review your best ideas and announce our selection soon — in early January, 2018," New Horizons team member Mark Showalter said on the Frontier Worlds voting website. That basically assures that names deemed too ridiculous will be weeded out.
Whatever NASA chooses won't be MU69's official name.
The International Astronomical Union is the body responsible for coming up with an official name for the distant object, which is about 1 billion miles away from Pluto.
"After the flyby, once we know a lot more about this frontier world, we will work with the International Astronomical Union to assign a formal name to MU69," Showalter added.
You can vote and submit your favorite nicknames for MU69 online through NASA.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
