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New Horizons is a robotic spacecraft mission conducted by NASA. It is expected to be the first spacecraft to fly by and study the dwarf planet Pluto and its moons. NASA may also approve flybys of one or more other Kuiper Belt Objects. The craft was built primarily by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). New Horizons was successfully launched on January 19, 2006. After a flyby of Jupiter on February 28th, 2007 at 5:43:40 UTC, New Horizons is expected to arrive at Pluto in July 2015 before leaving the Solar System.

The New Horizons spacecraft was launched directly into an Earth- and solar-escape trajectory. It had an Earth-relative velocity of about 16.21 km/s (36,260.7373 mph) just after its last engine shut down, making it the fastest spacecraft launch ever. New Horizons is the first mission in NASA's New Frontiers mission category, larger and more expensive than Discovery missions but smaller than "flagship" programs.