Pluto-bound spacecraft carrying ashes of Illinois astronomer

Associated Press

STREATOR, Ill. - The NASA spacecraft set to complete a flyby of Pluto on Tuesday is carrying some of the ashes of the Illinois astronomer who discovered the dwarf planet.

Clyde Tombaugh grew up on a farm in Streator, 80 miles southwest of Chicago, where he became enthralled with the night sky with the help of his uncle's homemade telescope. That fascination led him to a job at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he discovered Pluto in 1930 at the age of 24.

As NASA's New Horizons spacecraft and its cargo of scientific instruments close in on the mysterious, tiny, icy world after nine years and 3 billion miles, Tombaugh's relatives and residents of his hometown are remembering him as an inspiration.

Tombaugh's farming family endured financial hardships, never owned their home and moved often, according to relatives.

"That a boy from that setting can learn so much in a small school in a small town and go right on to do something like this is just inspiring," said Ed Brozak, Streator councilman and member of the town's tourism committee.

"Clyde Tombaugh was just a regular kid," Brozak told The Daily Southtown. "I saw a photograph of him outside his first school. He's got bare feet and is wearing overalls."

Paul Tombaugh, a second cousin, says his relative was so into astronomy that friends nicknamed him Comet Clyde and Telescope Tombaugh.

Paul is caretaker of a handmade 7-inch telescope that Clyde slapped together and used while making drawings of Jupiter and Mars that were so detailed they landed him a job offer from the observatory in Arizona.

That original telescope was featured on a float in the Streator Fourth of July parade this year.

Tombaugh died in 1997 and his widow watched in tears in 2006 as a rocket carrying the New Horizons craft lifted off from Cape Canaveral.

That same year, Pluto was reclassified from a full-fledged plant to a dwarf planet based on the discovery of similar objects in a band of celestial bodies beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt.

Streator schoolchildren responded with a campaign to get it reinstated.

"We have a new slogan: We Believe," said Brozak, the Streator councilman.

New Horizons will be the first spacecraft to get so close to Pluto - within 7,750 miles - out on the fringes of the solar system.

Whether or not new insights bump Pluto back up to full planet status, Tombaugh would have been pleased, says another second cousin, Judith Bliss.

"He would want Pluto to be a planet, of course, but he was more interested in the advancement of science and learning about the solar system," she said.