NASA celebrates stamp that has traveled 3.5 billion miles

In a statement, Jim Cochrane, USPS chief marketing and sales officer and executive vice-president, said, “In 2006, NASA placed 29-cent “Pluto: Not Yet Explored” stamp on board New Horizons spacecraft on its way to Pluto and beyond”.

The stamp, which traveled 3.26 billion miles in its past ten years aboard the New Horizons spacecraft, was honored in a ceremony Tuesday at the Postal Service headquarters.

When New Horizon space craft flew beyond Pluto, the stamp was cancelled last July but later they planned to put the record straight.

Guinness World Records recognized the stamp at Postal Service headquarters in Washington on Tuesday for the farthest distance traveled by a postage stamp. In all, it traveled 3 billion miles to get to Pluto and will likely travel another billion miles as New Horizons continues toward the Kuiper Belt.

Well, the stamp’s motto is now out of date, and it’s time to celebrate the record it has set. It took three days for Apollo 11 to reach the moon.

New Horizons came within 7,800 miles (12,500 km) of Pluto’s surface last July. “It really inspired us when we were building New Horizons to explore this last of the classical planets”.

The dwarf planet was reached by the spacecraft on July 14, 2015, which was the first time that any spacecraft has reached there and thus brought close-ups of the mysterious planet. The two stamps feature an artist’s rendering of the spacecraft and an image of the dwarf planet as taken by New Horizons. Coggins presented a certificate recognizing the record to the Postal Service’s Jim Cochrane, NASA’s Jim Green and the Southwest Research Institute’s Alan Stern, who is the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission. The Postal Service issued the Pluto-Explored! Art director Antonio Alcalá of Alexandria, VA, designed the stamps. “Not Yet Explored” stamp flew 3 billion miles aboard the spacecraft. It starts with a relatively distant view of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, and then pulls you in, closer and closer, to the attractive heart-shaped Sputnik Planum region on Pluto, an icy plain. However, if the New Horizons stamp is displayed alone (without the Pluto stamp), the credit line is: “Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute” Please Note: For broadcast quality video and audio, photo stills and other media resources, visit the USPS Newsroom.