The launch of the New Horizons mission to Pluto on 19 January 2006. The spacecraft was at the top of a three-stage rocket and is the fastest ever launched. Image: NASA / KSC The first mission to Pluto – New Horizons – was launched on 19 January 2006. The probe took off after a two-day delay caused by high winds at NASA's Cape Canaveral base. It was carried into space at record speed by a three-stage rocket.

NASA engineers were keen to see the mission leave before 3 February, so that it can fly past Jupiter in February next year. The gravity of the giant planet will give the spacecraft a much-needed boost and ensure that it reaches Pluto in the summer of 2015. Without the Jupiter flyby, New Horizons might not have reached the outermost planet until as late as 2020.

Scientists have sent spacecraft to all the other planets from Mercury to Neptune, but Pluto and its three moons are still unexplored. This tiny world is smaller than the Moon and so far away that even our largest telescopes reveal almost no detail. There is also some urgency in sending a probe to Pluto. The planet seems to have a tenuous atmosphere that may freeze out as it moves further from the Sun and it won't appear again until the 23rd century.

Artist's concept of the New Horizons spacecraft during its planned encounter with Pluto and its moon, Charon. Image credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI) If funding is agreed, New Horizons will travel on from the outermost planet to take a close look at one or two of the small of the tens of thousands of objects that orbit the Sun beyond Neptune. This region, the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, is thought to be the source of some of the comets that populate our local bit of the solar system. These interplanetary fossils may be little changed since the Sun and planets formed 4500 million years ago.