Send your name to Pluto

The New Horizons Mission to Pluto, Charon and the Kuiper Belt blasts off from Cape Canaveral in January 2006 arriving around 2015 depending on the launch window. NASA are inviting people to send their names on a CD ROM carried by the space probe to our solar system's farthest frontier! This is the web page pluto.jhuapl.edu . You can registar to send your name and print out a certificate of participation (use landscape)

The latest edition of Material World on BBC Radio 4 featured a piece on the discovery of Pluto at Lowell Observatory, 75 years ago.

The programme includes an interview with the woman who named the planet. She was an 11 year old English girl called Venitia Burney whose grandfather worked at the Oxford Bodlean Library and had contacts with Lowell Observatory. The astronomers liked her suggestion as PL could stand for Pluto and also Percival Lowell.

Charon incidently was named when the man who discovered it realised that his wifes name Sharon wouldn't be accepted as an offical name so he trawled around for an alternative Greek god with a suitable moniker!

The programme can be heard at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/rams/materialworld.ram

Broadband is probably required. Apologies to all those suffering Eircom's feeble internet connects!