Short answers, pulled from the story.
New Horizons launched on the 19th of January 2006 from Cape Canaveral at a speed of 16.26 km/s, making it the fastest human-made object ever launched from Earth at the time. It cleared the Moon's orbit in just nine hours.
New Horizons was built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the Southwest Research Institute. Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute served as principal investigator, with Alice Bowman as Mission Operations Manager.
New Horizons flew 12,500 km above Pluto's surface at 11:49 UTC on the 14th of July 2015, when Pluto was 34 AU from the Sun. The spacecraft passed within 28,800 km of Pluto's moon Charon during the same encounter.
486958 Arrokoth, nicknamed Ultima Thule, is a Kuiper belt object with an estimated diameter in the 30-55 km range. New Horizons made its closest approach on the 1st of January 2019, flying within 3,500 km at 43.4 AU from the Sun. It was the first flyby target discovered after the spacecraft's launch.
Nine cultural artifacts are aboard, including 434,738 names on a compact disc, two American flags, a Florida state quarter, a Maryland state quarter, a piece of SpaceShipOne, and a USPS stamp reading "Not Yet Explored." About 1 oz of Clyde Tombaugh's ashes are also carried, commemorating his 1930 discovery of Pluto.
As of April 2026, New Horizons was 64.21 AU from Earth, still traveling through the Kuiper belt. NASA plans to keep it operational until it exits the Kuiper belt, expected in 2028 or 2029. The spacecraft will eventually go silent in the 2030s when its RTG decays too far to power the transmitters.