Pluto's discoverer told the New Horizons team they were welcome to his planet
In 1992 a NASA engineer phoned Clyde Tombaugh, who found Pluto, to ask permission to visit. Tombaugh said yes, warning it would be a long, cold trip. It took until 2015. New Horizons, launched faster than any craft before it, finally flew past Pluto and then kept going deep into the Kuiper belt.
The mission's roots lie in that 1992 call from JPL scientist Robert Staehle, which sparked a string of Pluto proposals. In December 2000 Tom Krimigis of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory assembled a team with Alan Stern as principal investigator, a man Krimigis called the personification of the Pluto mission. Their bid beat a rival from the University of Colorado Boulder and won selection in November 2001, only for NASA's new administrator to leave it out of the 2003 budget. Stern lobbied hard to keep it alive.
An Atlas V launched the probe from Cape Canaveral on 19 January 2006, sending it straight onto a path out of the Solar System at about 16.26 kilometres per second relative to the Sun. No human-made object had left Earth at a higher average speed. A swing past Jupiter on 28 February 2007 added velocity and gave the instruments a trial run on the planet's atmosphere and moons. The spacecraft then slept for most of the long cruise, waking for annual checkups, until it was brought fully back online in December 2014.
On 14 July 2015 it passed 12,500 kilometres above Pluto, then 34 astronomical units from the Sun, becoming the first spacecraft to explore the dwarf planet and sending home the first high-resolution pictures of it and its moons. The final data from that encounter arrived in October 2016. On New Year's Day 2019 it flew by the Kuiper belt object Arrokoth, once nicknamed Ultima Thule. It also helped confirm a hydrogen wall at the Solar System's edge that the two Voyagers first detected in 1992.
By April 2026 New Horizons was more than 64 astronomical units from the Sun. A proposed budget cut for 2026 was fought off in Congress, and NASA plans to operate it until it leaves the Kuiper belt, expected in 2028 or 2029.
Source: New Horizons
