In 2006, NASA launched an ambassador to the outskirts of the Solar System. The New Horizons spacecraft is on approach for a dramatic flight past the icy dwarf planet Pluto and its moons in July 2015. After almost 10 years and more than 3 billion miles, on a historic voyage that has already taken it over the storms and around the moons of Jupiter, New Horizons will shed light on new kinds of worlds on the fringe of the Solar System. Pluto gets closer by the day, and New Horizons continues into rare territory, as just the fifth probe to traverse interplanetary space so far from the Sun - and the first ever to travel to Pluto.
New Horizons is making its first reconnaissance of Pluto and its moons and is designed to help us understand the worlds at the edge of our Solar System. Then, as part of an extended mission, New Horizons will visit one or more objects in the Kuiper Belt region far beyond Pluto.
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Maryland Science Center (MSC) have produced this 2-minute overview of the mission and will produce additional segments over the course of the mission.
Science On a Sphere
