New Horizons
NASA launches New Horizons toward Pluto
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗Forty-four minutes and 53 seconds after liftoff, a kick stage let go of a piano-sized spacecraft already moving fast enough to leave Earth behind.
Atlas V 551 at 19:00 UTC
An Atlas V 551 launched New Horizons from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, at 19:00 UTC — 2:00 p.m. EST — on 19 January 2006.
The spacecraft separated from its Star 48B solid-fuel kick stage 44 minutes 53 seconds after liftoff. Controllers received its first signals a little more than five minutes later through a Deep Space Network antenna at Canberra, confirming it was healthy.
That final boost put the 1,054-pound probe on an Earth-escape trajectory toward the outer Solar System at roughly 36,400 miles per hour relative to Earth.
What was on the rocket
New Horizons is a piano-sized, RTG-powered robotic probe carrying seven scientific instruments.
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and controlled it, with Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute leading the science mission.
NASA had selected the mission in 2001, as the first project in its New Frontiers program, to carry out the first close reconnaissance of Pluto and Charon and to explore the Kuiper Belt.
Two things worth keeping straight
The corpus article filed under this date describes none of the launch; it consists entirely of later mission background.
Pluto was still officially the ninth planet on launch day — the IAU reclassified it as a dwarf planet in August 2006. And New Horizons had the highest Earth-relative launch velocity then achieved, which is not the same as staying the fastest-moving spacecraft by every measure.
NASA's contemporaneous launch release, mission catalog and archival chronology all give 19 January; a 2023 NASA article says 18 January in one sentence, an apparent page error rather than a real dispute.
Sources
Researched 24 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →
What the sources leave uncertain
- NASA's contemporaneous launch release, mission catalog and archival chronology all give January 19. A 2023 NASA article says January 18 in one sentence; that is an apparent agency-page typo, not a genuine date dispute.