Clyde Tombaugh’s Pluto Ashes Flight

In 1930, a 23-year-old farm boy named Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto after spending nearly a year comparing photographs of the night sky for a moving “star.” He had no astronomy degree at the time, but he later earned a master’s degree and taught at New Mexico State University. Tombaugh kept studying Pluto and the outer solar system throughout his life until he died in 1997, at age 90. In 2006, NASA launched a portion of his ashes aboard the New Horizons spacecraft, sending him on a posthumous journey to the world he had found.

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