Watch the story of the New Horizons probe which was sent to explore Pluto in 2015. Pluto is a scientific goldmine. It’s located in a region of space called the Kuiper Belt, where there are many small planets and trillions of comets. It takes 248 Earth years for Pluto to orbit our sun. Creating the conditions for New Horizons even to do a flyby of Pluto was an astronomical (pun intended) scientific feat.