Scientists want to visit a mysterious object beyond Pluto that's a celestial time capsule

NASA made history in July when it flew past Pluto with the New Horizons spacecraft, but it's not stopping there.

New Horizons is zooming farther and farther out into the Kuiper Belt - a zone of trillions of small, icy objects that litter the outer edge of our Solar System and act as celestial time capsules.

As a followup to the Pluto flyby, the team behind NASA's mission wants to steer the spacecraft toward a Kuiper Belt object (KBO) known as 2014 MU69 and nicknamed Potential Target 1 (PT1).

PT1 is one of three potential targets NASA liked. It's nearly a billion miles beyond Pluto and is only about 30 miles wide. Because New Horizons has very little fuel left, there's has a short window of opportunity to point New Horizons in the right direction - if it's not made sometime this fall, the spacecraft might miss its target years from now.

NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Alex Parker)

The team will begin steering New Horizons toward PT1, which is almost 4 billion miles from Earth, in October.

If the spacecraft makes it, it'd be another historic first because we've never seen anything in the Kuiper Belt up-close, save Pluto. KBOs are so far away from the sun, they're basically perfect frozen samples of the material that formed the outer Solar System 4.6 billion years ago.

Before New Horizons can visit PT1 and extend the mission, though, the team needs NASA's approval and the funding to back it.

But everyone seems to be feeling upbeat about getting that approval.

"[W]e expect it to be much less expensive than the prime mission while still providing new and exciting science," John Grunsfeld, chief of NASA's science mission directorate, said in a press release.

The New Horizons mission cost about $700 million, but there aren't specific numbers on what a mission to PT1 will cost yet. The New Horizons team expects to fly by PT1 in 2019 if all goes according to plan.