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Think about that for a minute: seventy years earlier, photons of light from the Sun had reflected off Pluto, traveled for four hours and over all those billions of miles to Earth, and passed through a telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona. Those photons created a tiny dot in a plate of photographic emulsion that had caught young Clyde Tombaugh’s eye when he examined that image a few weeks later, revealing the existence of a new, faraway planet. Now some atoms that had been part of Clyde were going to make the journey to that faraway world and then continue on, outward, to leave our solar system for interstellar space and the galaxy beyond. Whatever you believe about life, death, consciousness, and fate, this was surely a unique and wondrous memorial, unlike any other in history.
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