NASA's Pluto mission awarded tough-to-beat Guinness Record
Meteorologist/Science Writer
Wednesday, July 20, 2016, 3:18 PM - NASA's New Horizons probe just set a new Guinness World Record that's likely to stand for a very long time, plus today we celebrate two milestones in human history - the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing and 40 years of robots on Mars! It's What's Up In Space!
NASA probe awarded for farthest "postal delivery" ever
In 1991, the U.S. Postal Service introduced something new - the 29 cent “Pluto Not Yet Explored” stamp. Roughly 15 years later, after serving as inspiration and a rallying point for NASA to plan a mission to Pluto, one of these stamps launched into space, inside NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which was bound for a July 2015 Pluto flyby.
Now, just over a year after that incredible encounter, Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, travelled to the Washington D.C. headquarters of the USPS, to receive a Guinness World Record for this feat.
"The ‘Pluto Not Yet Explored’ stamp was cancelled last July when New Horizons flew past Pluto," Stern told a crowd gathered for the ceremony, where he accepted the Guinness award for 'farthest distance traveled by a postage stamp'.
New Horizons PI Alan Stern holds up the Guinness World Record he accepted on July 19, 2016. Credit: NASA/Dan Afzal, U.S. Postal Service
According to NASA:
The “little stamp that could” is continuing its record-setting journey, now 274-million miles (441-million kilometers) beyond Pluto, continuously breaking the world record it just set. NASA has approved an extended mission for a Jan. 1, 2019 flyby of a Kuiper Belt object one billion miles past Pluto. Known as 2014 MU69, it’s considered one of the early building blocks of the solar system.
Congratulations to Alan Stern and the entire New Horizons team, for a mission that continues to deliver amazing results!
Humans first set foot on the Moon
On July 20, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the Moon, as they exited the Apollo 11 lunar module onto the raw surface of Mare Tranquillitatis, also known as the Sea of Tranquility.
This was an incredible milestone moment for the human race. We had already been putting people into space for over 8 years, ever since Yuri Gagarin's first orbit of the Earth in April 1961.
This, the Apollo 11 mission, however, was the first time any humans had walked on the surface of another celestial body. Not only that, it was the surface of a body that humans had been looking up at for millennia, with some actually trying to imagine what it was like to walk there.
To commemorate the 47th anniversary of this event, let's enjoy this brief montage of mission highlights:
Celebrating 40 years of Martian robots!
On July 20, 1976, just 7 years after the first Moon landing, NASA set another milestone, as its Viking 1 lander touched down on the surface of Mars.
This was not the first successful landing on Mars, as the USSR's Mars 3 lander managed to safely reach the surface on December 2, 1971. Viking 1, though, was the first to successfully land and continue operating long enough to return significant data to Earth, as Mars 3 stopped talking to Russian controllers after only 14.5 seconds. Thus, Viking 1 can be thought of as the mission that truly kicked off the era of Martian robots!
Sunset on Mars, from the Viking 1 landing site. Credit: NASA/JPL
Viking 1 was only planned as a 90-day mission on the surface of Mars, but went on to return science and observations for over 6 years, until November 13, 1982, when a software fault caused it to fall silent. By this time, the lander had already outlived its twin, Viking 2, which landed on September 3, 1976 and ran out of battery power in April of 1980.
Viking 1's record of operation, for a total of 2245 Martian sols (2307 Earth days), would stand for nearly 28 years, until it was broken by NASA's MER Opportunity, on May 19, 2010.
Watch below as NASA highlights this incredible first success at investigating the Martian surface, and how it led to the missions currently exploring there:
Currently, Mars is the only planet we know of that is (apparently) entirely populated by robots. In 2020, NASA's next Mars rover may finally answer the question about whether there really is, or at least was, biological life on the Red Planet.
