Clyde Tombaugh

Clyde William Tombaugh (LaSalle, Illinois, February 4, 1906-Las Cruces, New Mexico, January 17, 1997) was an American astronomer who discovered the dwarf planet Pluto in 1930. For To locate it he used a blink microscope, with which he compared photographs of a region of the sky that had been taken several days apart.

Tombaugh passed away in 1997. In 2006, about an ounce of his ashes were sent into space on the New Horizons mission, along with a probe that tracked this dwarf planet for the first time in history, reaching it on July 14, 2015.

Discovery of Pluto

Instrument to take photographs used by Tombaugh.

Tombaugh worked at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he was conducting a systematic search for bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. He was looking for planet X, a hypothetical planet capable of explaining by its gravitational interactions with Neptune some details of the latter's orbit. The existence of Planet X had been predicted by Percival Lowell and William Pickering.

Pluto was named after the Roman god of the world of the dead, capable of turning invisible. The name was favored among a list of several others in part because it began with the letters PL, the initials for Percival Lowell.

Honors

Eponymy

The asteroid (1604) Tombaugh discovered by Carl Otto Lampland on March 24, 1931 was named in his honor for the discovery of Pluto, at the Lowell Observatory's proposal. In all, Tombaugh discovered 15 asteroids primarily in his searches for Pluto and other planets.

They are as follows:

His ashes and the New Horizons probe

Clyde Tombaugh's ashes travel in a container attached to the bottom of the New Horizons probe. On the lid of this space burial urn is an inscription in English: “Inside are the remains of the American Clyde W. Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto and the third zone of the solar system. Son of Adelle and Muron, husband of Patricia, father of Annette and Alden, astronomer, teacher, punter, and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906-1997)".