🛰️ Mission
New Horizons
Nine years to Pluto, for one day of pictures.
- Launched
- 19 January 2006, 20 years ago
- Working for
- 20 years so far
- Built by
- NASA
- Where it is
- Out past Pluto in the Kuiper Belt, still sending back data
- Best known for
- The first close look at Pluto, in July 2015 — nitrogen glaciers, mountains of water ice and a heart-shaped plain
Did you know?
- It left Earth faster than anything before it, and still took nine and a half years to arrive.
- In 2019 it flew past Arrokoth, a 36 km object four billion miles further out: the most distant thing anyone has visited.
Where it went
Pluto
The famous former planet, with a giant heart of ice.
Charon
Pluto’s giant moon, about half as wide as Pluto itself.
More NASA photos of New HorizonsStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.