Pluto mission team dedicates Science Operations Center to discoverer of
Pluto


Boulder, Colorado -February 6, 2002- On Monday, February 4, on what would
have been the 96th birthday of Pluto's discoverer, Clyde W. Tombaugh,
NASA's New Horizons Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission team announced the
dedication of its Science Operations Center in his honor. 

"Henceforth, the New Horizons Science Operations Center will be known as
the Tombaugh Science Operations Center, or TSOC," said Dr. Alan Stern,
director of the Space Studies Department at Southwest Research Institute
(SwRI) and principal investigator for New Horizons. The New Horizons
Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission is now in preliminary development for NASA. If
approved and funded for construction later this year, it would launch in
January 2006. 

In March 1930 the astronomical community was stunned by the discovery of
the ninth planet, Pluto. This discovery by Tombaugh, who at the time was
at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., culminated a
quarter-century-long search for a planet beyond Neptune. Pluto is the only
planet discovered by an American. Tombaugh died in 1997 at age 90. 

"Clyde Tombaugh is an astronomer's hero -- a farm boy with sharp eyes and
a keen mind whose persistence was rewarded with a major discovery," said
Dr.  Fran Bagenal of the University of Colorado, New Horizons
co-investigator and lead scientist for the mission's Education and Public
Outreach program. 

Stern said that Tombaugh's planetary discovery was named Pluto on the
suggestion of Venetia Burney, an English schoolgirl. "The amazing thing is
that 72 years after Clyde's discovery, children still love Pluto. It's
their favorite planet," said Stern. 

The Tombaugh Science Operations Center, located in Boulder, will be
responsible for generating scientific instrument observing plans, for data
archiving and reduction, and for supporting scientific investigators using
New Horizons data for the flyby of Jupiter in 2007, the flyby of Pluto and
its moon Charon in 2016, and at Kuiper Belt Object flybys thereafter. 

A TSOC dedication ceremony was held February 4 in Las Cruces, N.M., the
home of Tombaugh's widow, Patsy, and their children, Annette Tombaugh-Sitz
and Alden Tombaugh. Clyde Tombaugh was a professor at New Mexico State
University in Las Cruces for more than 30 years. Mrs. Tombaugh accepted a
plaque from Stern commemorating the dedication of the TSOC. 

Pluto is the most distant known planet and the largest member of the
Kuiper Belt. Kuiper Belt Objects -- a class of objects composed of
material believed to have been left over after the formation of the other
planets -- have never been exposed to the higher temperatures and solar
radiation levels of the inner solar system. Pluto has large quantities of
ices of nitrogen and simple molecules containing combinations of carbon,
hydrogen, and oxygen, necessary precursors of life on Earth. The gases
comprising these ices would be largely lost to space if Pluto had come
close to the sun. Instead they remain on Pluto as a sample of the
primordial material that set the stage for the evolution of the solar
system as it exists today. 

SwRI leads the New Horizons team, which also includes major partners at
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.;
Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif.; Ball Aerospace Corp., Boulder; the
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; and the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab will
build the New Horizons spacecraft and operate it in flight. More
information on the New Horizons mission can be found at
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu. 

Editors: The plaque presented to Patsy Tombaugh in honor of her husband,
Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh, can be viewed at
www.swri.org/press/tombaugh.htm