ABSTRACT
In January 2006, the New Horizons mission was launched as an interplanetary space probe as part of the NASA New Frontiers program. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) engineered the spacecraft. It was launched mainly to study Pluto, its moons, and the Kuiper belt, and also to perform flybys of the Pluto system and other Kuiper belt objects. The spacecraft is the result of many years of work on missions to send a spacecraft to Pluto.
