The U.S. Postal Service has released its designs for its 2016 stamps and has revealed that one of the most important space stories in recent memory, the NASA New Horizons mission to Pluto, will finally be immortalized in stamp form.
According to Discovery, the New Horizons craft has a bit of history with stamps thanks to the project’s principal investigator Alan Stern. In 2006, when the craft was being prepped for its journey to the edges of our the solar system, it was attached with a 1991-minted Pluto stamp which read “Pluto — Not yet explored.”
Pluto remained entirely unexplored until July 14, 2015, when the New Horizons spacecraft arrived in the Pluto system and began taking some serious beauty shots of the dwarf planet. At the time, Pluto was the last “classical” planet in the solar system to remain unexplored to any capacity.
As a result of the tireless efforts hundreds of NASA scientists, astronomers, and engineers dedicated to the near decade long New Horizons project, the craft will soon be represented in a USPS stamp for commemorative purposes.
“The New Horizons project is proud to have such an important honor from the U.S. Postal Service,” said Stern in a USPS news release. “Since the early 1990s the old, ‘Pluto Not Yet Explored’ stamp served as a rallying cry for many who wanted to mount this historic mission of space exploration.”
“Now that NASA’s New Horizons has accomplished that goal, it’s a wonderful feeling to see these tamps join others commemorating first explorations of the planets.”
The stamps themselves include an artist’s impression of the New Horizons spacecraft along with the now famous composite observation photos taken of Pluto on the craft’s approach.
The USPS. also announced that another set of stamps featuring all the other planets of the solar system will be released as well. Additionally, a set of commemorative Star Trek stamps will see the fronts of many an envelope in 2016.