Clyde Tombaugh goes to Pluto

Here’s a trick question: Who’s the fastest human being ever?

New Horizons at Pluto	(JHUAPL/SwRI)

When New Horizons, the first spacecraft to explore Pluto, was launched on a cold afternoon in January 2006, it carried a little piece of the planet’s^‡ discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, with it. No, I don’t mean that metaphorically. I’ll let the spacecraft’s builders explain:

“In memory of the first American to discover a planet in our solar system, the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft carries a small aluminum canister containing some of Tombaugh’s cremated remains, donated by his family. These remains will fly past Pluto with New Horizons on July 14, 2015, and then on past Kuiper Belt objects in the succeeding years. New Horizons will eventually escape our solar system altogether and enter interstellar space. As such, Tombaugh’s remains have become the first to be launched to the stars. The memorial canister, about two inches wide and half-an-inch tall, is attached to the inside, upper deck of the spacecraft.”

Happy 100th Birthday, Clyde Tombaugh ^[1]

Table 1.
Clyde Tombaugh – a Potted Biography

Born:		Feb. 4, 1906
Discovered Pluto:		Feb. 18, 1930
Died:		Jan. 17, 1997
…
Launched to Pluto:		Jan. 19, 2006
Arrives at Pluto:		July 14, 2015

The remains of Timothy Leary and Gene Roddenberry are already in low Earth orbit ^[2], but Clyde Tombaugh has gone one better and escaped Earth orbit altogether. In fact he’s gone two better and escaped solar orbit as well – a feat unlikely to be repeated in our lifetimes. New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever launched. Clyde Tombaugh has got a ride on the fastest vehicle ever flown, albeit posthumously, and is flying out to the stars.

New Horizons will be the fifth spacecraft to leave the solar system. Four earlier probes have reached solar escape velocity (Pioneer 10 & 11, Voyager 1 & 2), but they needed a Jupiter gravity-assist to do it. New Horizons reached solar escape velocity straight off the pad.

The launch of New Horizons on January 19, 2006 from Cape Canaveral. The launch vehicle is an Atlas V 551 rocket. Although the spacecraft is quite small (480kg), it needed the largest Atlas V configuration, with five solid strap-on boosters, to launch it, because of the extraordinarily high velocity it had to reach to set a course for Pluto. The Atlas V accelerated New Horizons to 36,250mph, making it the fastest spacecraft ever launched, and putting it directly onto a solar escape trajectory. Even so, it’ll take nearly 10 years to reach Pluto.    longer (3:11) launch video

Now let’s wind back time, to a farm in Burdette, Kansas in the late nineteen-twenties. Clyde Tombaugh is working on the family farm, and learning to build home-made telescopes in his spare time. Robert Goddard has just flight-tested his first liquid-fuel rocket in March 1926. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression are still to come. In January 1929, Clyde Tombaugh takes up a three month trial position at the Lowell Observatory to continue the search for Planet X. He’d got the job on the strength of his skills as an amateur astronomer. Thirteen months later, in early 1930, he walks into the director’s office and declares “Doctor Slipher, I have found your Planet X.”

As he made his announcement back in 1930, I think he would not have imagined – he simply could not have imagined – that eighty-five years later, his cremated remains would be flying past the planet he had discovered, 6,200 miles above its surface. Yet these events are separated by a single lifetime, by less than a single century. For me, there’s a sense of future shock in that.

Clyde Tombaugh

“Tombaugh remained active long past retirement and never lost his passion for stargazing. When the Smithsonian Institute asked if it could have for its museum the telescope he made in 1928, “I told them I was still using it,” he said in an interview. The 9-inch telescope, with which he made the drawings that impressed the Lowell Observatory staff, was built with parts of discarded farm machinery and a shaft from his father’s 1910 Buick. Tombaugh ground the mirrors himself. Until frail health prevented it, Tombaugh continued observing the heavens through that 9-inch telescope and a larger one he made himself, from his back yard in the Mesilla Park community of Las Cruces.”

Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, dies ^[3]

Footnote

‡   Well, dwarf planet, but that’s another story.

References

1. Happy 100th Birthday, Clyde Tombaugh, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Press Release, Feb. 3, 2006
2. Ashes of LSD guru, ‘Star Trek’ creator to rocket into orbit, CNN News, Apr. 20, 1997
3. Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, dies, New Mexico State Univ. Press Release, Jan. 18, 1997
4. Clyde Tombaugh: Discoverer of Planet Pluto (Sky & Telescope Observer’s Guides), David H. Levy, Sky Publishing, (2007)