New Horizons flew past Pluto so quickly that an encounter nine years in the making was effectively over within hours — but the data gathered during that brief passage took another 15 months to trickle

NASA's New Horizons mission successfully completed a high-speed flyby of Pluto in 2015, transforming the distant planet from a blurred image into a detailed world. The mission required years of planning for a brief encounter that yielded a massive amount of scientific data.