New Horizons was sent to perform a flyby study of the Pluto system .
Engineered by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory APL and the Southwest Research Institute SwRI , with a team led by S. Alan Stern , the spacecraft was launched in 2006 with the primary mission to record data on Mars in 2015 , and a secondary mission to fly by and study one or more other Kuiper belt objects KBOs in the decade to follow .
New Horizons