New Horizons

New Horizons


New Horizons is the first space probe to visit Pluto, its moons, and other icy objects in the Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt is considered an ancient relic of our solar system and thus is suspected to hold a great deal of insights on how planets form. The probe studied Pluto and its moons for five months during the summer of 2015 and is now studying various Kuiper Belt objects. New Horizons is expected to gain information about the surface, geology, interior makeup and atmospheres of Pluto and other Kuiper Belt objects it encounters. Prior to New Horizons, the highest resolution view of Pluto came from the Hubble Space Telescope in low Earth orbit.


(top image: Pluto as seen by New Horizons on July 13, 2015, NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI)