The U.S. Postal Service is looking to the cosmos for inspiration in its latest collections of stamps.
The agency's lineup of stamps for the new year includes a collection commemorating the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek series, a celebration of NASA's historic Pluto flyby mission last year, a lunar-themed set and stamps featuring all of the solar system's planets.
NASA's New Horizons voyage to Pluto will be honored with two stamps -- one featuring the spacecraft itself and another emblazoned with an enhanced image of the dwarf planet. A banner across the top of the stamps reads, "Pluto -- explored!" -- a reference to a previous set of Pluto stamps issued in 1991 that were titled "Pluto: Not yet explored."
Those earlier Pluto stamps had a special significance to the most recent exploratory program: NASA placed one of the adhesives on board the New Horizons spacecraft when the mission was first launched in 2006.
“Since the early 1990s the old, ‘Pluto Not Explored’ stamp served as a rallying cry for many who wanted to mount this historic mission of space exploration," said New Horizons team leader Alan Stern in a press release. "It’s a wonderful feeling to see these new stamps join others commemorating first explorations of the planets.”
The four Star Trek stamps feature illustrations of the USS Enterprise starship, a hand giving a Vulcan salute and the silhouette of a crew member being beamed up against backgrounds of yellow, red, blue and green -- the four colors of the Starfleet uniforms.
It's not the first time the postal service has nodded to the TV series in its stamps. Star Trek previously landed a place among the agency's "Celebrate the Century" collection in 1999.
Among the other collections the agency previewed this week were a set devoted to the moon and one featuring images of Earth and its seven planetary neighbors.
