This artist’s concept shows NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its 2015 encounter with Pluto and its moon, Charon.

In July 2015, NASA's New Horizons became the first spacecraft to visit dwarf planet Pluto. The far-traveling spacecraft also flew by an object called 2014 MU69, or Ultima Thule, in January 2019. Observations from New Horizons are revolutionizing our understanding of solar system objects orbiting far from the sun.

The spacecraft's extreme distance from Earth makes it only the fifth to venture so far from home, the others being Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, and Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Those last two have voyaged so far that they entered interstellar space.

New Horizons is the first of NASA's New Frontiers mission probes, which are medium-class missions designed to explore different destinations in the solar system. (Other selected missions include the Juno Jupiter mission and the OSIRIS-ReX mission to return a sample from asteroid Bennu.)

New Horizons was initially selected for funding in 2001 but was excluded from the NASA 2003 budget. Funding for the mission was reinstated after New Horizons was listed as a top priority in the Planetary Science Decadal Survey of 2003–2013, which identifies scientific targets for future exploration.

Spacecraft typically have a set design lifetime, similar to warranties on electronics or cars. Over time, solar particles, cosmic rays and other phenomena can degrade the surface of the spacecraft or mess up the electronics. This makes long missions like New Horizons especially challenging, requiring backup systems and a source of power (nuclear power) to keep the spacecraft alive far away from the sun.

New Horizons launched Jan. 19, 2006, on an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. A power outage and high winds had delayed two previous launch attempts, but New Horizons made it safely into space on the third try.

Zipping by Jupiter

The spacecraft's first destination was Jupiter, which it visited in February and March 2007. New Horizons passed by at less than 1.4 million miles (2.4 million kilometers) from the solar system's largest planet, making this the first spacecraft to swing by since the Galileo probe finished its mission at Jupiter in 2003.

Among New Horizons' first pictures were shots of Io, Jupiter's volcanic moon. The spacecraft captured the clearest pictures ever taken of the Tvashtar volcano on Io, showing volcanic fallout that was bigger than the state of Texas.

Additionally, the spacecraft flew through a stream of charged particles swirling behind Jupiter. The probe found large bubbles of charged particles, or plasma, and also revealed variations in the stream of particles. At the time, astronomers said the observations could help with understanding the environment around "hot Jupiter" planets found at other stars, or planets the size of Jupiter that orbit very close (the equivalent orbit of Mercury, or even closer) to their stars.

To conserve energy and lessen the chance of anything breaking, controllers kept the Pluto-traveling spacecraft in hibernation, aside from periodic wake-ups for navigation and systems checks. NASA had the probe emerge from hibernation in December 2014, so it could get ready for the Pluto encounter and send data back to Earth.

This is a montage of New Horizons images of Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io, taken during the spacecraft’s Jupiter flyby . The image was released in Oct. 2007. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)

Pluto encounter

New Horizons was so busy gathering data in its July 2015 encounter that, as planned, the spacecraft didn't communicate with Earth during its closest approach to Pluto and the dwarf planet's largest moon, Charon. Controllers celebrated when New Horizons phoned home, as they knew that data was on the way.

Pluto's distance, about 3 billion miles (5 billion km) from Earth, presented power challenges for the New Horizons designers, since the sun's rays at that distance are too weak to generate power. There are also long communications delays for those staying in touch with the 1,054-lb. (478 kilograms) spacecraft. When New Horizons reached Pluto, it took 4.5 hours for a one-way message to get there from Earth.

Early pictures from New Horizons showed a surprisingly young surface on Pluto, with a mountain range as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters). Believed to be about 100 million years old at most, this range likely points to recent geological activity on the surface, but it's unclear what caused it.

"This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds," said John Spencer, New Horizons geology, geophysics and imaging team deputy leader, in a statement released shortly after the encounter.

Halo-like craters on Pluto's surface display a puzzling distribution of methane ice and water ice. (Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

More youthful terrain — such as a huge plain bereft of craters, just north of the mountainous range — popped up in pictures sent back in mid-July of 2015. The zone has been informally named Sputnik Planitia and is a region of intense scrutiny, given that geologists are still trying to figure out what caused it.

Other telescopes found several new moons at Pluto during New Horizons' journey to the dwarf planet, presenting a challenge for spacecraft navigators, who were concerned about orbital debris affecting the spacecraft’s trajectory. Fortunately, the moons were found well ahead of the Pluto encounter, and New Horizons faced no obstacles while whizzing through Pluto's system.

Some of New Horizons' other scientific discoveries included evidence of a past subsurface ocean on Charon and strange water-ice hills on Pluto floating in frozen nitrogen. In 2018, one study suggested that there may be an asphalt layer on Pluto, just beneath the world's surface. Some scientists have also suggested that Pluto could have the ingredients for life on its surface, even at its great distance from the sun.

This high-resolution image from New Horizons shows the “shoreline” of Sputnik Planitia on Pluto. (Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI)

Pluto's planetary status change

New Horizons was already in space when the International Astronomical Union voted to change Pluto's status to "dwarf planet" in 2006, following the discovery of several similar-size objects in the Kuiper Belt.

New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern has repeatedly said he is not in favor of the decision, especially after the flyby revealed that Pluto has a more complex formation history than initially anticipated.

In 2017, a group of planetary scientists submitted a proposal to reclassify Pluto as a planet, making their recommendations at the 48th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. The proposal redefined a "planet" as a round object that has never experienced fusion (unlike a star); the definition is expected to encompass not only dwarf planets, but also moons. Officially, Pluto is still considered a dwarf planet as of early 2019.

2014 MU69 flyby

With NASA approval in 2016, New Horizons' mission was extended to take a closer look at a Kuiper Belt object dubbed 2014 MU69 , which NASA nicknamed Ultima Thule .

In September 2017, New Horizons concluded a planned five-month hibernation period in preparation for the probe's extended mission. Until December of that year, New Horizons took several photos of Kuiper Belt objects. Notably, some of New Horizons' 2017 photographs included images of objects 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85.

Given New Horizons' great distance from Earth at the time (3.79 billion miles or 6.12 billion km from Earth), the spacecraft's images became the farthest photos ever captured by a spacecraft flying from Earth. The previous record had been held by Voyager 1, which took the famous "Pale Blue Dot" image of Earth on Feb. 14, 1990, from 3.75 billion miles (6 billion km) away.

New Horizons flew by MU69 on Jan. 1, 2019 . The little world is so far from Earth that NASA didn't known until 10 hours later if the flyby was successful. At its closest approach, New Horizons zoomed by MU69 at a distance of about 2,000 miles (3,540 km), which was 5,800 miles (9,300 km) closer than the craft flew by Pluto.

Artist's illustration of the New Horizons spacecraft flying by the roughly 25-mile-wide (40 kilometers) object 2014 MU69 on Jan. 1, 2019. (Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Alex Parker)

The first photos of MU69 showed that it was made up of two lobes, each almost spherical. NASA nicknamed the largest lobe Ultima and the smallest one Thule. These lobes appeared red (likely fading over time due to radiation) and actually used to be separate objects, which, over time, were gravitationally attracted to one another.

New Horizons is so far out in the Kuiper Belt that sending data back to Earth takes significant time. Investigators have said it will take roughly 20 months for all of the MU69 data to flow back to Earth, which means new information will continue to arrive up until late 2020.

By March 2019, enough data had been sent to Earth that researchers could create a map showing the complex geology of MU69. It's possible that several different building blocks converged to form the object , although that information is being investigated further; the lumpy surface of MU69 still was puzzling investigators . The team also released a 3D image that shows the relative sizes of different lumps and bumps on MU69.

More flybys?

In September 2017, Stern told the Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG) in La Jolla, California, that he expected the mission had a "fighting chance" of encountering another object after 2014 MU69. As of late 2018, Stern and his team are still working on the possibility of flying by another Kuiper Belt object in the 2020s , although this depends on the approval of another extended mission by NASA.

Meanwhile, even after the mission ends, a group of scientists, artists, engineers and more are proposing placing a crowd-sourced message from Earth on the free hard-drive space on New Horizons.

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