NASA Pluto Stamp Holds Guinness World Record For Farthest Traveled Postal Stamp

NASA celebrates a 29 cent Pluto post stamp that was stuck to the New Horizons spacecraft's side. NASA's Pluto stamp is recognized in Guinness World Records for the farthest distance traveled by a postal stamp.

NASA's 1991 postage stamp that carried the message "Pluto Not Yet Explored" inspired the team of astronauts on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. The stamp traveled approximately 3.5 billion miles from Earth's atmosphere.

NASA's astronauts stuck the stamp before the spacecraft launched in January 2006. In 2015, the U.S. Postal Service cancelled the stamp after NASA's New Horizons passed by Pluto last July, ABC News reported.

After 15 years, the NASA stamp served as inspiration for NASA to pursue a mission to Pluto, which was successful on July 2015. Principal investigator of the NASA New Horizons mission, Alan Stern, went to USPS Washington D.C. headquarters to receive the Guinness World Record for the "farthest distance traveled by a postage stamp" marking that successful flyby significant in space history.

Two months ago, USPS released a new stamp "Pluto - Explored!" in commemoration of NASA's New Horizons Pluto flyby on July 15, 2015.

Meanwhile, July 20 was a celebration for three milestones NASA accomplished. One was for NASA's New Horizons setting a Guinness World Record for the Pluto stamp travel and another for the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing and lastly, 40 years of NASA robotics on Mars.

NASA made a new announcement that the New Horizons mission will journey beyond Pluto towards the Kuiper Belt object known as 2014 MU69, which is considered the building blocks of the solar system, Star Tribune reported.

NASA and the USPS marked the world record achievement on July 19, 2016 at the Postal Service headquarters in Washington D.C. Many NASA space fans are asked to share the news to social media using #PlutoExplored.