Space & Astronomy

NASA's New Horizons probe wakes up as it journeys through Kuiper Belt

By T.K. Randall
July 8, 2026

Image: Artist's Concept of New Horizons
Credit: (PD) NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute 5.9 billion miles from Earth, a small, man-made object careens through the emptiness of space.

This is New Horizons, a spacecraft that launched all the way back in 2006 with the goal of becoming the first to ever visit Pluto - a tiny, icy world that was originally considered to be one of the main planets of our solar system until it was reclassified as a dwarf planet.

The probe succeeded admirably, reaching Pluto in 2015 where it captured a wealth of data and massively increased our knowledge of this otherwise distant and unreachable world.

But New Horizons didn't stop there.Having completed its primary objectives, the spacecraft ventured onward into the Kuiper Belt with the goal of intercepting and studying some of the icy bodies found there.

In 2019, it flew by an object known as Ultima Thule at approximately 4 billion miles from the Sun.

This week, following a hibernation period of almost a year, New Horizons awoke to begin yet another chapter in its journey - returning even more data about this distant part of the solar system.

As things stand, NASA is expected to continue supporting the mission for several more years.

What it will find out there remains, for the moment at least, a compelling mystery.

Source: Phys.org

Tags: New Horizons