This event marked the beginning of a new era in space exploration. On January 19, 2006, the New Horizons spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to explore the outer reaches of the Solar System. The spacecraft was designed to study the dwarf planet Pluto and its moons,
New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe launched as a part of NASA's New Frontiers program. It was launched in 2006, becoming the first spacecraft to perform a flyby study of the Pluto system in 2015. A secondary mission contained a flyby and study of one or more other Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) in the decade to follow, where it flew past 486958 Arrokoth in 2019. It was the first space probe to ever take high-resolution photographs of Pluto, in 2015.