After a nine-and-a-half-year cruise, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft raced past Pluto on 14 July 2015, sending back the first close-up maps of its icy surface and heart-shaped plain.
The flyby revealed mountains of water ice, a thin atmosphere, and a surprisingly young-looking landscape. Later it visited Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth.
A tiny probe turned a point of light into a world. New Horizons closed the first reconnaissance of the classical planets’ neighborhood.
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