Description

Back in 1991 I did a series of postage stamps, one for each planet and the moon. There was a spacecraft associated with each world...except Pluto. It was labeled "Not Yet Explored". This rankled so many space scientists that a movement was started to launch a Pluto exploration mission. This eventually culminated in the New Horizons probe. As a kind of thank-you for the inspiration, Alan Stern---the mission's principal investigator---attached one of the stamps to the spacecraft (and invited my wife and me to the launch).

The stamp joined the ashes of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh on the New Horizons spacecraft (right).

In 2016, the stamp was listed by Guinness World Record as having achieved the furthest distance ever traveled by a postage stamp: over 3 billion miles.

This painting, which depicts a typical scene on Pluto (including its giant moon, Charon, and two of its smaller moons), has an original uncirculated Pluto stamp attached to its matte.