Facts about New Horizons Pluto flyby
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Launched in January 2006, New Horizons took approximately nine and a half years to travel the 5 billion kilometers from Earth to Pluto.
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Pluto's tenuous atmosphere extends approximately 160 kilometers above its surface, collapsing and refreezing onto the dwarf planet's surface as it moves farther from the Sun after 2030.
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Pluto's surface temperature plunges to minus 380 degrees Fahrenheit, making it cold enough that New Horizons instruments detected frozen methane behaving like rock.
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Pluto's five moons include Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra, with the latter four discovered between 2011 and 2012 before New Horizons arrived in 2015.
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New Horizons revealed that Pluto rotates on its side with an axial tilt of 120 degrees, making it one of the most extreme axial tilts among planets and dwarf planets in our solar system.
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Pluto's heart-shaped Tombaugh Region contains water ice mountains reaching 3.5 kilometers high, discovered by New Horizons during its 2015 flyby mission.
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In 2015, New Horizons detected methane, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide ices in Pluto's atmosphere, revealing it to be far more chemically complex than scientists had predicted.
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At closest approach on July 14, 2015, New Horizons passed within 12,500 kilometers of Pluto, traveling at 49,600 kilometers per hour relative to the dwarf planet.
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The New Horizons spacecraft captured images revealing Pluto's largest moon Charon has a massive canyon system 9 kilometers deep stretching across its surface.
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During the July 14, 2015 Pluto encounter, New Horizons discovered nitrogen ice plains covering 1,600 kilometers across Pluto's surface.