NASA launched the New Horizons spacecraft on January 19, 2006, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. New Horizons is a robotic spacecraft, specially designed for Pluto. It is the size and shape of a Grand Piano, with its electricity provided by heat from the decay of a radioactive plutonium isotope, which is used to power a thermoelectric generator.
The mission of New Horizons is to explore Pluto and Pluto’s three moons, Charon, Nix and Hydra; map the surface of the two, study their geology, study Pluto’s atmosphere, search for an atmosphere around Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, and study the surface temperatures of the two. It is also going to search for rings and other satellites around Pluto. The ship will continue its travels to the Kuiper belt, beyond Neptune. There it will explore one or more regions of the Kuiper Belt, and conduct the same type of studies.
Beside the payload of imaging devices, spectrometers, communication devices and other equipment that is necessary to maintain and operate a space probe, New Horizons is carrying some special cultural items. Among them are two versions of the American flag, a Florida state quarter, a Maryland state quarter, a 1991 U.S. stamp with the inscription, “Pluto: Not Yet Explored”, a CD containing 434,738 names, some of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh; the man that discovered Pluto, and a small piece of SpaceShip One. The piece of SpaceShip One has an inscription on each side: front side; “To commemorate its historic role in the advancement of spaceflight, this piece of SpaceShip One is being flown on another historic spacecraft: New Horizons. New Horizons is Earth’s first mission to Pluto, the farthest known planet in our solar system.” Back side: “SpaceShip One was Earth’s first privately funded manned spacecraft. SpaceShip One flew from the United States of America in 2004.”
Pluto is the only planet, in the Solar System, that is left to be explored. After the launch, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) There are three classes of planets in our Solar System: the terrestrial planets (rocky), Earth, Venus, Mars and Mercury; the Gas Giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus, and the ice dwarfs. Pluto and the dwarfs in the Kuiper Belt, are classified as Ice Dwarf Planets. This is the first mission to explore the ice dwarf planets.
The New Horizons Mission will not only be the first to explore Pluto and the Kuiper belt, but will be the first to send information back from the outskirts of our Solar System. It will be the first to explore a binary planet. Pluto and Charon form a binary-planet (double planet). Charon is about half as large as Pluto. They share a gravitational balance point between them.
New Horizons crossed through Mars’ orbit in April of 2006. It got a gravity boost from Jupiter on February 28, 2007, increasing its speed by 9000 mph. On its way past Jupiter, New Horizons measured the orbits of Jupiter’s inner moons, did long distance studies of its outer moons , and studied its rings and its magnetosphere. The spacecraft flew through Saturn’s orbit on June 8, 2008 and crossed through the orbit of Uranus, on March 18, 2011; 2.9 billion kilometers from Earth.
On August 24, 2014, New Horizons will pass through Neptune’s orbit; passing through its fifth planetary orbit. On June 25, 2011, the mission entered its 1,983 day, and is expected to reach Pluto in 1,480 days, on July 14, 2015. In 2016, it will arrive in the Kuiper Belt, where it will remain until 2022, exploring its objects. It is expected to have enough power to maintain high speed communications until 2025 and low rate communications afterwards. The New Horizons is expected to leave our Solar System in 2029 and explore the galaxies beyond.
A model of New Horizons has been added to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.