Video: New Horizons animation

Thirteen years outbound from Earth and a billion miles past Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons probe is healthy and on course for a historic New Year’s Day flyby of its next target, a frozen remnant left over from the birth of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago, project scientists say.

In a triumph of deep space navigation and with Pluto shrinking in its wake, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has steered on a course to reach a tiny object named 2014 MU69 for a whirlwind visit on New Year’s Day 2019.

New maps produced from data gathered during the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of Pluto last year show surprisingly widespread water ice shaping mountains capped by methane snow and forming an underlying bedrock blanketing the distant world.