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New Horizons Trivia Questions

How much do you really know about New Horizons? Below are 8 true or false statements. Click each one to reveal the answer and explanation.

1.

New Horizons flew past Pluto in 2015, giving us the first close-up images of the dwarf planet.

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Easy
✓ TRUE

It performed the historic flyby on July 14, 2015, capturing detailed photos of Pluto and its moons for the first time.

2.

New Horizons used a gravity assist from Jupiter to speed up its journey to Pluto.

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Easy
✓ TRUE

It swung past Jupiter in 2007, gaining a velocity boost that shaved about three years off its travel time.

3.

New Horizons discovered that Pluto has a ring system similar to Saturn's.

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Medium
✗ FALSE

No rings were found around Pluto; the probe did reveal mountains, glaciers, and a thin atmosphere, but no rings.

4.

New Horizons is powered by solar panels, just like most other deep-space probes.

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Medium
✗ FALSE

It uses a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) because sunlight is too weak in the outer solar system for solar panels.

5.

New Horizons carries a small container of Pluto's soil that New Horizons collected during New Horizons' flyby.

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Medium
✗ FALSE

The spacecraft had no lander or sample-return capability; it only gathered data via remote sensing during its high-speed flyby.

6.

After Pluto, New Horizons flew past a Kuiper Belt object named Arrokoth in 2019.

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Medium
✓ TRUE

It successfully encountered Arrokoth (formerly 2014 MU69) on January 1, 2019, making it the most distant flyby ever.

7.

New Horizons carries a memorial tribute to the discoverer of Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh.

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Hard
✓ TRUE

A small container with some of Tombaugh's ashes is onboard, honoring the astronomer who found Pluto in 1930.

8.

New Horizons is the farthest human-made object from Earth.

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Hard
✗ FALSE

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is much farther. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is over 14 billion miles from Earth, whereas New Horizons is about 5 billion miles away.

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