New Horizons

The New Horizons craft was built primarily by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). The mission's principal investigator is Dr. S New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006 directly into an Earth-and-solar-escape trajectory. New Horizons is the first mission in NASA's New Frontiers mission category, larger and more expensive than Discovery missions but smaller than "flagship" programs.. Alan Stern (NASA Associate Administrator, formerly of the Southwest Research Institute). New Horizons is a robotic spacecraft mission by NASA currently underway.

It is expected to be the first spacecraft to fly by and study the dwarf planet Pluto and its moons, Charon, Nix, and Hydra. NASA may also approve flybys of one or more other Kuiper Belt Objects.It will arrive at Pluto on 14 July 2015 then continue into the Kuiper belt. New Horizons was originally planned as a voyage to what was then the only unexplored planet in the Solar System. When the spacecraft was launched, Pluto was still classified as a planet, later to be reclassified as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

The cost of the mission (including spacecraft and instrument development, launch vehicle, mission operations, data analysis, and education/public outreach) is approximately $650 million over 15 years (from 2001 to 2016). An earlier proposed Pluto mission – Pluto Kuiper Express – was cancelled by NASA in 2000 for budgetary reasons.

Navigation, which is not realtime, is performed at various contractor facilities; KinetX is the lead on the New Horizons navigation team and is responsible for planning trajectory adjustments as the spacecraft speeds toward the outer solar system. However, some members of the New Horizons team, including Alan Stern, disagree with the IAU definition and therefore still describe Pluto as the ninth planet. Pluto's newly-discovered satellites, Nix and Hydra, also have a connection with the spacecraft: The first letters of their names, N and H, are the initials of "New Horizons". The moons' discoverers chose these names for this reason, in addition to Nix and Hydra's relationship to the mythological Pluto.

. Overall control, after separation from the launch vehicle, is performed at Mission Operations Center (MOC) at the Applied Physics Laboratory. The science instruments are operated at the Clyde Tombaugh Science Operations Center (T-SOC) in Boulder, Colorado. It had an Earth-relative velocity of about 10.1 miles per second (16.26 km/s or 58,536 km/h) after its last engine shut down, making it the fastest spacecraft launched to date. As of 2008, it has a velocity of about 12 miles per second (19.31 km/s). In addition to the scientific equipment, there are several cultural artifacts travelling with the spacecraft. These include a collection of 430,000 names stored on a compact disc, a piece of Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne, and an American flag, along with other mementos. One of the trim weights on the spacecraft is a Florida state quarter, and principal investigator Alan Stern has also confirmed that some of the ashes of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh are aboard the spacecraftIt flew by Jupiter on 28 February 2007 at 5:43:40 UTC and Saturn's orbit on 8 June 2008 at 10:00:00 UTC.