Our Contribution
Beyond Pluto
Not even four years after NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft left Pluto and its moons in the rearview mirror—and revolutionized humankind’s view of these small, dynamic worlds on the edge of our solar system—the APL-built and -operated probe conducted a flyby of an ancient Kuiper Belt object, named Arrokoth, on New Year’s Day 2019. Arrokoth is the most distant object ever explored by a spacecraft, more than a billion miles farther from our Sun than Pluto. New Horizons continues its speedy voyage deeper into the Kuiper Belt, hurtling toward the doorstep of interstellar space while making groundbreaking measurements of dust and the heliospheric plasma environment far from the Sun.