Advertisement

Pluto stamp earns world record for traveling 3 billion miles

That's one well-traveled 1.5-inch x 1-inch piece of paper.

NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

"Pluto: Not Yet Explored" is the envy of all stampkind. It has officially earned a Guinness World Record for the farthest distance traveled by a postage stamp after journeying for 3.26 billion miles aboard the New Horizons. NASA stuck it aboard the probe when it took off in 2006 but has since issued new ones celebrating the spacecraft's successful exploration of the dwarf planet.

The "Pluto - Explored!" series features an image of the probe itself and a photo it took of the celestial body that shows its famous heart-shaped region. Cute, but they still got nothing on that one lucky piece of paper that's now on its way to Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69. By the time it reaches the icy rock that might be one of the oldest objects in our solar system, the stamp would have added a billion more miles to its journey.

While it took almost a decade for the stamp to reach Pluto, it still got there at an incredible speed: New Horizons went past the moon within nine hours, whereas the Apollo 11 took three days to get to its destination. Guinness World adjudicator Jimmy Coggins said that if the Pony Express tried to deliver a letter to a destination 3 billion miles away, "they would be swapping ponies out for the next 47,000 years..."