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NASA's New Horizons To Arrive At Pluto With Clyde Tombaugh's Ashes
hypnosec writes NASA's New Horizons is bringing with it the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh – its discoverer – as it cruises towards the now dwarf-planet or 'plutoid'. The probe will be close enough on January 15 to start observing Pluto. Clyde Tombaugh discovered the ice and rock-laden Pluto in 1930 and one of his final requests was that his ashes be sent into space. Tombaugh died on January 17, 1997. Fulfilling that wish NASA has fitted the upper deck of New Horizons probe with a small container containing Tombaugh's ashes alongside a total of 7 scientific instruments. "Interned herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system's 'third zone'", reads the inscription on the container.
Just a small portion of his ashes. Postage to the Kupier belt is still pretty expensive.
Lunar Prospector carried Gene Shoemaker's ashes to the Moon, and was "deliberately targeted to impact in a permanently shadowed area of the Shoemaker crater near the lunar south pole." Now, they did that for science reasons, but it was still a very fitting end (they could have chosen another crater, of course).
New Horizons will start imaging (and optical navigation) this month, but it won't be better than Hubble until mid-May. That's when the fun will really start.
And would they have sent his ashes if Pluto had been demoted already?
You are confused. Pluto was not "demoted". It in its old (inaccurate) classification it was the smallest and last planet to be discovered, a Johnny-Come-Lately.
What Tombaugh really did was discover the first of a whole new class of objects - the Kuiper Belt Objects that extend far past the planets. And Pluto is its king - it is the largest and most prominent of all the KBOs (Eris, is queen, having the exact same diameter as far as we can tell, but is more distant and dimmer).
Discovering a whole new class of objects beats discovering yet another planet.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age