Which spacecraft first flew by Pluto in 2015?

Which spacecraft first flew by Pluto in 2015? The answer is New Horizons. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made the first close flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015, transforming the distant dwarf planet from a few blurred telescopic pixels into a geologically complex world with mountains, glaciers, and a large heart-shaped region.

New Horizons launched from Cape Canaveral on January 19, 2006, as part of NASA’s New Frontiers program. During its journey, it used a gravity assist from Jupiter in 2007 to increase its speed and shorten the trip to the outer solar system. The Pluto encounter was a flyby rather than an orbit insertion because slowing down enough to enter orbit would have required far more fuel.

The spacecraft passed within roughly 12,500 kilometers of Pluto’s surface and also studied Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, along with its smaller moons. After Pluto, New Horizons continued into the Kuiper belt and flew past Arrokoth in 2019.