Where is New Horizons now?

New Horizons is a robotic spacecraft that NASA launched in 2006 to make the first visit to Pluto. After Pluto it flew on to a second, smaller world, and it is still heading outward.

Line up the spacecraft we have sent away from Earth. The space station stays close to home. The James Webb Space Telescope works about 1.6 million kilometres out. Juno circles Jupiter. Next comes New Horizons, about 9.9 billion kilometres away. Only the two Voyagers are farther.

Neptune, the last planet, circles the Sun at about 30 times Earth's distance. New Horizons is far past it, in the Kuiper Belt. This is a wide ring of icy bodies left over from when the planets formed. Pluto is the best known of them.

Out here sunlight is faint, and a radio message needs many hours to cross the gap. Yet the craft still listens, measures and answers.

At Pluto, New Horizons was so far away that its radio signal took 4 h 25 m 19 s to reach Earth. During the flyby the team could only wait.

Early on 15 July, by universal time, a short burst of status messages arrived. The flyby had worked, and the craft was healthy.

Then came the slow part. So far from home, New Horizons could send only a trickle of data each second. The last of the Pluto flyby data reached Earth on 25 October 2016, more than a year later. Every picture of that heart arrived one small piece at a time.

After Pluto, the team steered New Horizons towards a much smaller target. It was a Kuiper Belt object found with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014. Its name, Arrokoth, means "sky" in the Powhatan/Algonquian language.

On 1 January 2019 New Horizons passed within 3,538 kilometres of it. It was 6.6 billion kilometres from Earth, the farthest exploration of any world so far.

Arrokoth turned out to be two rounded lobes resting against each other, like a flattened snowman, and very red. Its two parts most likely formed separately and merged gently, early in the solar system's history. It is a piece of the material the planets were built from.

New Horizons still moves outward at 13.58 kilometres per second relative to the Sun. The Sun's pull can no longer turn it around.

On 23 June 2026 the team confirmed it had woken, in good health, from a hibernation of nearly a year. While it slept, its instruments kept sampling the solar wind, charged particles and dust. NASA plans to keep it working until it leaves the Kuiper Belt, expected in 2028 or 2029.

The team is also searching for another small world it could reach, though none is known yet. Like the Voyagers before it, New Horizons is heading for the edge of the Sun's bubble, carrying a little of us with it.