This is the best summary I could come up with:

New Horizons is now nearly twice as far from the Sun as Pluto, the outer planets are receding fast, and interstellar space is illuminated by the vast swath of the Milky Way ahead.

Since its launch in January 2006, the New Horizons spacecraft has traveled over 5 billion miles, passed by the moons of Jupiter, and surveyed the scaley frozen methane ice of its target planet Pluto.

Led by Alice Bowman—the mission’s version of Star Trek’s Scotty—engineers start building a command load three months in advance, then run them on a simulator at the Applied Physics Laboratory to check that they’re sound.

Sweeping past the contact binary Arrokoth at a distance of just 3,500 kilometers (2,198 miles) in 2019, the images that New Horizons returned appeared to an untrained eye to resemble an unspectacular lumpy potato.

Modeling the detailed data New Horizons obtained of this 36-kilometer-long (22-mile) by up to 20-kilometer-wide (13-mile) object, shows that the larger side was assembled from 8 to 10 smaller components, which all had to be moving quite slowly to successfully “dock.”

“If they’d come together faster, their outlines would have been smooshed by the impact,” said Will Grundy, head of the mission’s Planetary Geology team at Lowell Observatory, where Pluto was discovered in 1930.

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