Mission Atlas
← Mission directory

Mission record

New Horizons

NASA, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory · Launched

Explore trajectory

Active · Active

NASA's active New Horizons mission performed the first close exploration of Pluto and later flew past Arrokoth, the most distant object explored up close.

Destinations
Launch vehicle
Atlas V 551
Launch site
Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 41
Countries
United States
Mission types
Flyby

Chronology

Mission timeline

  1. Launch

    New Horizons launched

    Earth

  2. Gravity assist

    Jupiter gravity assist

    Jupiter

  3. Flyby

    Pluto flyby

    Pluto

  4. Flyby

    Arrokoth flyby

    Arrokoth

Mission architecture

Vehicles

Trajectory record

Precise trajectory

Sun-centred J2000 states sampled offline from NASA/JPL NAIF SPICE kernels with geometric (NONE) aberration correction, using the P+90 reconstructed navigation solution for the Pluto approach, encounter and departure (nh_recon_pluto_od122_v01.bsp), with DE440s furnished last so planetary positions match the committed body ephemerides. Sampling is weekly across the roughly nine-and-a-half-month arc and tightens to 60 s within six hours of closest approach. The record covers only the Pluto encounter phase (2014-12-08 to 2015-09-27): New Horizons' NAIF archive actually delivers reconstructed navigation as six contiguous files (confirmed by spkcov, with junction gaps under a second), and the generator can furnish and search against all of them together. This dataset does not, because only the Pluto encounter was committed here - extending it to the Jupiter and Arrokoth flybys is a data change (a new spec naming those encounters), left to its own task, not attempted in this one. The computed Pluto closest approach of 13,674 km sits 17 km below the 13,691 km published by Stern et al. (2015, Science); the reconstructed navigation kernel is followed here and the difference is recorded rather than reconciled. The dataset's recorded barycentre-to-centre offset for this encounter is 1,708.225 km, but that figure is the difference of two independent closest-approach searches (to the system barycentre and to Pluto's centre) that converge about 92 seconds apart, not Pluto's physical separation from its own system barycentre at one instant - queried directly via SPICE, that separation is about 2,135 km, outside Pluto's own ~1,188 km radius, because Charon is unusually massive relative to its primary. The catalogue's general barycentre-offset budget was not originally sized for a system this lopsided, so lib/trajectory/validate.ts now carries a per-body allowance derived from the measured physical separation.

J2000 · Sun-centered · 1509 samples

Coverage: December 8, 2014 to September 27, 2015

Provenance

Sources

Each source is listed once and labeled with the mission, event, trajectory, or destination/body context it supports.

Data verified through August 31, 2026