Broadening Your Horizons

The US Postal Service has made history after a stamp which they placed on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft travelled a mind-boggling 5,250,843,896 km (3,262,723,132 miles) – all the way to the planet Pluto. In 2006, NASA placed a 29-cent 1991 ‘Pluto: Not Yet Explored’ stamp in the New Horizons spacecraft. In 2015 the spacecraft carried the stamp on its history-making mission to Pluto and beyond. With this stamp, the Postal Service recognises the first reconnaissance of Pluto in 2015 by NASA’s New Horizon mission. The 2016-issued souvenir sheet of four stamps contains two new stamps appearing twice. The first stamp shows an artists’ rendering of the New Horizons spacecraft and the second shows the spacecraft’s enhanced colour image of Pluto taken near its closest approach.