Ashes of Kansan who discovered Pluto to pass near planet

Clyde Tombaugh is making history again.

The Kansan who discovered Pluto before he even had a college degree will become the first human on Tuesday to have his remains carried past the tiny planet – 18 years after his death and 85 years after his discovery.

For the past 9 1/2 years, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has been speeding across the solar system on a 3-billion-mile journey toward Pluto.

The Washington Post on Monday called the journey “the equivalent of a golfer on the East Coast hitting a ball across the continent and making a hole-in-one in Los Angeles.” So declared the project manager, Glen Fountain, at a news briefing Monday at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the home of the New Horizons mission.

Already, there have been new discoveries on this journey – photos from the mission show linear features that scientists said might be cliffs, as well as what appears to be an impact crater. Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, shows a gash in the surface larger than the Earth’s Grand Canyon.

It was enough on Monday to make Wichitan Ruth Tombaugh Martinez proud again of her famous uncle.

“It is exciting because it is opening a lot of new worlds in space we haven’t known about,” Martinez said. “Pluto was the door that opened up New Horizons in space. He would have been so excited.”

Martinez and her brother, Glenn Tombaugh, pastor at Wichita’s Mount Vernon United Methodist Church, traveled Monday to Burdett to celebrate at the town’s senior center. Burdett, where Clyde Tombaugh grew up, is about 50 miles southwest of Great Bend.

Journey to Pluto

Pluto is the largest among the dwarf planets in a solar system known as the Kuiper Belt.

“The mission is a fly-by so there will be no real orbit,” says Bruce Twarog, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas. “The satellite will be taking data as it flies past and beyond Pluto, but it is a nice tribute to Clyde, promoting the notion that Pluto is a significant object.”

The satellite carries some of the ashes of Tombaugh. The NASA container with his ashes carries an inscription with a small typo: “Interned herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system’s ‘third zone.’ ”

One Pluto Twitter fan dryly tweeted: “Spelling mistake on #PlutoFlyby – ‘interned’ vs ‘interred’ – sets new record for human error farthest from Earth.”

The inscription also describes Tombaugh as “Adelle and Muron’s boy, Patricia’s husband, Annette and Alden’s father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend.”

Tombaugh’s legacy

Tombaugh’s fascination with astronomy landed him at Arizona’s Lowell Observatory in the 1920s, shoveling snow from a telescope dome and feeding coal into stoves. The job had the added benefit of photographing the night sky in search of a mysterious Planet X that the observatory’s founder, Percival Lowell, had plotted before he died in 1916.

Because of his father’s love of the night sky, Tombaugh developed an affinity for astronomy. When the family’s tiny store-bought telescope proved inadequate, a teenage Tombaugh began grinding mirrors and constructing his own. That earned him the nickname “Comet Clyde.”

Born in 1906 on an Illinois farm, Tombaugh moved with his family to rural Pawnee County as a teenager. In Kansas, he was fascinated by the night sky and made notes and drawings of his findings – sending some to Lowell Observatory.

Before he received formal training, Tombaugh was hired as a junior astronomer at the observatory, where he often hunched over the observatory’s telescope in freezing temperatures and exposed film until the wee hours.

His discovery process was methodical: Examining hundreds of photos taken of the same portion of the sky crowded with about 300,000 stars, Tombaugh explained later to reporters, he looked for tiny dots that differed slightly on any two photos.

On Feb. 18, 1930, Tombaugh, then 24, spotted a small shift in the position of an object in the plates. That shift showed what would become known as Pluto.

After Pluto’s discovery, Tombaugh earned a full scholarship at the University of Kansas, where he received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Tombaugh later founded the research astronomy department at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, regarded as one of the nation’s best.

“When you look at the history of Tombaugh and his desire to receive an education, he didn’t let a little thing like discovering a planet step in his way,” said Mike Reid, director of the KU History Project.

“It was remarkable that he did that and came up here and enrolled in KU. He is the only freshman that enrolled at KU that had already discovered a planet. I have heard stories that faculty members worried about having him in class because he already knew so much about astronomy.”

This story was originally published July 13, 2015 at 8:23 PM with the headline "Ashes of Kansan who discovered Pluto to pass near planet."