Images taken by a University of Arizona scientist soon will be on U.S. mail. They’re part of a set of planetary postage stamps being issued Tuesday.
The stamp set is called "Views of our Planets," with a stamp depicting each of the eight planets in our solar system. The U.S. Postal Service selected the images and worked with NASA to learn more about each one.
Lunar and Planetary Lab senior scientist Erich Karkoschka used the Hubble Space Telescope to capture images of Uranus in 2003. In 2004, he asked for time on the same instrument to attempt to obtain images of Jupiter with three of its moons in rare alignment for his research.
Karkoschka said he was given one orbit of the Hubble telescope around Earth – about 40 minutes – to make his Jupiter observations. He said the phenomenon he viewed hadn’t happened for 60 years when he made his proposal to NASA.
Karkoschka said that these planets would one day show up on postal envelopes was the last thing on his mind when he was capturing the images.