New Horizons

New Horizons is a space probe that flew past Pluto in 2015 and took the first sharp pictures of it.

Fact file

At launch, New Horizons was the fastest spacecraft ever launched: after only 9 hours it crossed the Moon's orbit.
On board are some of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.
The images of Pluto took 4.5 hours to reach Earth – and sending back all the data took more than a year.

New Horizons launched on 19 January 2006 and reached Pluto on 14 July 2015. So the flight took about nine and a half years.

The mission began on 19 January 2006.

New Horizons visited Jupiter and Pluto. All milestones with their dates are listed further down this page.

A NASA mission, built by the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University. About the size of a grand piano.

First flyby of Pluto (2015) and of the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth (2019), the most distant object ever visited.

At Pluto, sunlight is about 1,000 times weaker than on Earth – like at dusk.

19 January 2006Launch at Earth
Launch on an Atlas V rocket – when Pluto still counted as a planet (until August 2006).
28 February 2007Jupiter at Jupiter
Gaining speed at Jupiter – that shortened the journey by three years. Along the way, images of a volcanic plume on Io.
14 July 2015Pluto at Pluto
Flyby at a distance of 12,500 km: the heart, icebergs and blue haze – Pluto is an active world.
1 January 2019Arrokoth
Flyby of the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth, a snowman-shaped double body from the earliest days of the Solar System.