First spacecraft to fly past Pluto and the Kuiper Belt
New Horizons was the fastest spacecraft ever launched, reaching Jupiter in just 13 months and using its gravity assist to accelerate toward the outer solar system. Its July 2015 Pluto flyby revealed a geologically active world with towering water-ice mountains and a vast nitrogen-ice plain (Tombaugh Regio). In 2019 it made the most distant flyby in history, imaging Arrokoth — a contact-binary Kuiper Belt object 6.5 billion km from Earth.