New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe, launched as part of NASA's New Frontiers program. Launched to study Pluto, its moons and the Kuiper belt, on January 19, 2006, it set the record for the highest launch speed of a human-made object, with an escape velocity of about 36,373 mph (16.26 kilometers per second).
Reaching Jupiter, it made its closest approach on February 28, 2007, at a distance of 1.4 million miles. The Jupiter flyby provided a gravity assist that increased New Horizons' speed by 9,000 mph (4 km/s).
On July 14, 2015, it flew 7,800 miles (12,500 km) above the surface of Pluto, reaching 4.67 billion miles (7.5 billion km) from the Earth, and making it the first spacecraft to explore the dwarf planet. It began communicating the first images of the planet surface, received thirteen hours later by NASA, the data indicated the flyby was successful and the probe was operating as expected.
New Horizons will be gathering detailed images of the Pluto system (Pluto, Charon, Hydra, Nix, Kerberos and Styx), but due to the very limited bit rate of the downlink, it will take until the end of 2015 to get the compressed data and until late 2016 to receive the data in full resolution.
After completing its Pluto flyby, the spacecraft will be maneuvered for a flyby of a couple of large Kuiper belt objects, the first encounter expected on January 1, 2019.
By early 2023 the New Horizons space craft is deep in the Kuiper belt, traveling at 300 million miles per year away from the Sun and Earth. It is expected to stay in touch providing scientific data until mid to late 2030s.