NASA Remembers Wife of Pluto Discoverer


Clyde and Patsy Tombaugh, circa 1935. (Image: New Mexico State University Archives

New Horizons Team Remembers Patsy Tombaugh

January 16, 2012
It was January 2006, just days before the New Horizons spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. A reporter asked Patsy Tombaugh, widow of Pluto’s discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, what her husband might have thought about the first mission to the planet he found in 1930.
“He’d be very happy about it,” she said, “because he’d really want to know what they were finding out about Pluto.”
Today, the team fulfilling that wish mourns Patsy Tombaugh, who died Jan. 12 in Las Cruces, N.M. She was 99.

MORE: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20120116.php

gaw

Glenn A. Walsh, Project Director,
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