Clumsy Ducks Chase Dog Through Space
South Bend, Indiana (PRWEB) July 13, 2015 -- There is a small publishing house located in Indiana. It’s called Clumsy Ducks Publishing. The company is proud to have its name officially recorded on the compact disc that serves as the onboard passenger manifest for Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft probe. The probe with its passenger disc was launched from Earth on January 19, 2006, and is boldly going where no probe has gone before. Indeed it is about to rendezvous with its target, a very tiny, very distant planet…named Pluto. (1)
Although New Horizons was built to gather and send back to Earth great masses of scientific data throughout its long journey, photographers around the world may prefer to think of the probe as an oversized, to-die-for bag of cameras. Indeed the spacecraft’s phenomenal cameras have already captured spectacular images of Jupiter and its moons during a fly-by of that giant planet in February of 2007. (2)
This month, after a flawless 9.5 year flight across 3 billion miles of solar space, the New Horizons spacecraft will display an extraordinary degree of precision as it closes in on Pluto’s doorstep. On July 14, 2015, with the world holding its breath, the probe will actually catch up with Pluto and achieve an incredible closeness – about 7,800 miles. (3)(4)
The Plutonian advent of the New Horizons probe marks the first genuinely closeup encounter with that mysterious dwarf planet in the history of the human race. Furthermore, the images captured by the probe’s hi-tech cameras at that distance will be nothing short of stunning.
“We’ll be able to see football field-sized objects on the surface of Pluto,” says Hal Weaver of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. (4)
Clumsy Ducks’ involvement with New Horizons began about a decade ago, when it decided to formally add its name to the New Horizons passenger list. The list was just then being compiled by Nasa for the awesome trip ahead. The gesture, according to company President, Thomas Stump, was intended as a celebration of the publication of Clumsy Ducks' very first book, “My Angels Are Come.”
Now many years later, and with the New Horizons probe finally arriving on station at planet Pluto, Clumsy Ducks will applaud Nasa’s magnificent accomplishment with the release of its newest photography book, “AREA 6, A Photographic Expedition, The Kingsbury Ordnance Plant.” (5)
While the wealth of data and imagery streaming back from New Horizons will be studiously analyzed by teams of scientists for years to come, the probe itself will not linger long in Pluto’s front yard. Its continuing mission demands that it and its passenger manifest be quickly on their way, expanding the frontiers of human exploration ever outward into some of the farthest and darkest reaches of our outer solar system...known as the Kuiper belt. (4)
Sources:
(1) Nasa
2 JUN 2015
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/launch/index.html
(2) Nasa
26 JUN 2015
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/profile.cfm?Target=Jupiter&MCode=PKB
(3) Nasa
12 JUL 2015
http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/new-horizons-last-portrait-of-pluto-s-puzzling-spots
(4) Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University
5 JAN 2015
http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-01-05/after-long-cold-journey-nasas-new-horizons-probe-has-pluto-its-sights
(5) AREA 6 is a high-end, fine art coffee table book that photographically explores the remnants of the historic Kingsbury Ordnance Plant located in the rural Indiana countryside. The sprawling plant was once a key producer of munitions for America’s wartime military, beginning with World War II and continuing all the way through the Korean War, after which it was decommissioned.
http://www.lightinthemind.com
http://www.blurb.com/b/6158293-area-6-a-photographic-expedition
Thomas Stump, [email protected], http://www.clumsyducks.com, +1 (574) 274-3389, [email protected]
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