🔵From Florida to Pluto to the Kuiper Belt and beyond! Exactly 15 years ago today, an uncrewed NASA spacecraft by the name of New Horizons blasted off on a 3 billion-mile journey to Pluto from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station by an ULALaunch Atlas rocket at a speed of about 36,400 mph (16.26 km/s). It was the fastest human-made object EVER launched from Earth. By launching in 2006, New Horizons was able to take advantage of an assist from Jupiter. The Pluto probe approached a rendezvous with Jupiter and used the giant planet as a gravity-based slingshot. The five-month flyby induced a colossal burst of speed, accelerating the spacecraft by 9000 mph up to 52,000 mph. At that wild speed, you could soar from Los Angeles to New York in less than 4 minutes! After passing through the Pluto system in 2015, the spacecraft retargeted itself for an encounter with a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) called Arrokoth, a Native American term meaning “sky” in the Powhatan/Agonquian language. While there, t...