20 Facts About New Horizons

New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe that was launched as a part of NASA's New Frontiers program.

New Horizons was based largely on Stern's work since Pluto 350 and involved most of the team from Pluto Kuiper Express.

New Horizons proposal was one of five that were officially submitted to NASA.

In November 2001, New Horizons was officially selected for funding as part of the New Frontiers program.

New Horizons topped the list of projects considered the highest priority among the scientific community in the medium-size category; ahead of missions to the Moon, and even Jupiter.

Related searches

New Horizons is the first mission in NASA's New Frontiers mission category, larger and more expensive than the Discovery missions but smaller than the missions of the Flagship Program.

New Horizons was originally planned as a voyage to the only unexplored planet in the SolarSystem.

Some members of the New Horizons team, including Alan Stern, disagree with the IAU definition and still describe Pluto as the ninth planet.

New Horizons has both spin-stabilized and three-axis stabilized modes controlled entirely with hydrazine monopropellant.

New Horizons recorded scientific instrument data to its solid-state memory buffer at each encounter, then transmitted the data to Earth.

New Horizons was mechanically simplified to save weight, shorten the schedule, and improve reliability during its 15-year lifetime.

Knowledge about Jupiter benefited from the fact that New Horizons instruments were built using the latest technology, especially in the area of cameras, representing a significant improvement over Galileo cameras, which were modified versions of Voyager cameras, which, in turn, were modified Mariner cameras.

Four largest moons of Jupiter were in poor positions for observation; the necessary path of the gravity-assist maneuver meant that New Horizons passed millions of kilometers from any of the Galilean moons.

On 17 April 2021, New Horizons reached a distance of 50 astronomical units from the Sun, while remaining fully operational.

New Horizons team requested, and received, a mission extension through 2021 to explore additional Kuiper belt objects .

Two hours later, New Horizons surpassed its own record, imaging the Kuiper belt objects and from a distance of 0.

Images taken by the LORRI camera while New Horizons was 42 to 45 AU from the Sun were used to measure the cosmic optical background, the visible light analog of the cosmic microwave background, in seven high galactic latitude fields.

At that distance New Horizons saw a sky ten times darker than the sky seen by the Hubble Space Telescope because of the absence of diffuse background sky brightness from the zodiacal light in the inner solar system.

Since May 2020, the New Horizons team has been using time on the Subaru Telescope to look for suitable candidates within the spacecraft's proximity.

New Horizons has been called "the fastest spacecraft ever launched" because it left Earth at 16.