LAUREL, Md. — Even as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft bears down on one object in the Kuiper Belt, the mission team is already thinking about a second potential flyby in the 2020s. New Horizons will fly by 2014 MU69, nicknamed Ultima Thule, on Jan. 1, making its closest approach of about 3,500 kilometers at 12:33 a.m. Eastern. The spacecraft will not be in contact with Earth at the time of closest approach but will transmit a burst of “health and safety data” several hours later, arriving at Earth at 10:29 a.m. Eastern. The Ultima Thule flyby is going according to plan, project officials said Dec. 31. “The spacecraft is on course, it’s healthy, it’s conducting observations as we speak,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, during a press conference at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory here Dec. 31. While the near-term focus for the mission is the Ultima Thule flyby, project officials have started thinking about the possibility of sending Ne
