January 28, 2022
New Horizons is the first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, the region of ancient, icy, rocky bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. Led by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Southwest Research Institute, the NASA mission was authorized after being ranked at the top of the 2003 planetary decadal survey queue for medium-scale missions. The New Horizons spacecraft was launched on Jan. 19, 2006, passed Jupiter for a gravity boost and a successful test of the science payload in February 2007, and made a historic flight through the Pluto system on July 14, 2015 – returning data that has transformed our view of these intriguing worlds on the planetary frontier.
With Pluto and its moons in the rearview mirror, New Horizons is speeding deeper into the Kuiper Belt, conducting a wide variety of observations of Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) and the heliosphere. On Jan. 1, 2019, New Horizons accomplished the most distant close-up flyby of any NASA mission, zipping just 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) past 2014 MU69, now formally known as Arrokoth, an ancient KBO and building block of the solar system.
The Kuiper Belt Extended Mission 1 (KEM) took New Horizons one billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto for its rendezvous with Arrokoth, which was identified in 2014 using the powerful Hubble Space Telescope. This extended mission also includes distant studies of other KBOs, and heliospheric dust and plasma science in a region 50 times farther from the Sun than Earth.
New Horizons Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman will bring you inside this incredible voyage, recapping the Pluto system flyby and discussing the latest discoveries from the mission’s Arrokoth flyby and unprecedented observations in the Kuiper Belt.
We once thought Pluto marked the 'end' of the planetary system; in fact, Pluto is only the beginning – a harbinger of a new zone of icy dwarf planets that outnumber the larger planets of the solar system. The close encounter with Arrokoth – the farthest planetary encounter ever – added another chapter to the mission's remarkable story. And New Horizons continues to venture outward, poised to discover what lies on the edge of the solar system – and beyond …
Alice Bowman is a member of the Principal Professional Staff at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. She is the Space Mission Operations Group supervisor and the NASA New Horizons mission operations manager (MOM). She supervises approximately 50 staff members who operate deep space and Earth-orbiting spacecraft, including NASA’s TIMED, STEREO, New Horizons, Parker Solar Probe, and DART. Ms. Bowman’s experience also includes national defense space operations, systems engineering, program management, space systems, and space instrument development.
Ms. Bowman has a degree in chemistry and physics from the University of Virginia and has more than 30 years of experience in space operations. Asteroid 146040 Alicebowman, discovered by Marc Buie in 2000, is named after her. She is an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and has served on the International SpaceOps Committee since 2009.