Wrekking a Two Tonner: Instagram favs - Ten years ago today NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft rocketed into the sky above the Florida coastline, beginning its long journey into the history books. The small probe — weighing barely 1,000 pounds – sped from Earth faster than any spacecraft before it, embarking on a 9.5-year voyage across more than 3 billion miles that culminated last summer in the historic first reconnaissance of Pluto and its family of small moons. “With that flyby New Horizons completed a long-held goal of the scientific community and also five-decade-long quest by NASA to explore all the planets known at the start of the space age,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado. “And that all got its start 10 years ago today with our launch.” Today, New Horizons, now far beyond Pluto, continues to send back data from that July 14 flyby, and the detailed views of these strange new worlds have intrigued scientists and the public alike. #newhorizons #nasa