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New Horizons Digital Time Capsule

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Our Grand Prize Winner, Bill Sterns of Wylie, Texas, won a trip to the Applied Physics Laboratory to witness New Horizons' encounter with Jupiter on February 27-28, 2007! Visit The Planetary Society Weblog for the latest news and updates on New Horizons.

The Planetary Society, in conjunction with the New Horizons mission, invited children and adults around the world to send a message to future Earth -- a New Horizons Digital Time Capsule from those who launched the mission to the inhabitants of Earth who will receive its results nearly a decade later.

The New Horizons Digital Time Capsule consists of photographs of things in 2006 that people expect will be transformed by 2015. Hundreds of people from more than 40 countries submitted photographs with captions for consideration. Fifty were selected for inclusion in the Time Capsule, and the winner was selected at random from among them. The images can be viewed here until March 31, 2007, after which the time capsule will be closed until New Horizons approaches Pluto.

The New Horizons Digital Time Capsule has been placed on a DVD and will be kept securely at Planetary Society Headquarters in Pasadena, California, with a backup copy stored with the New Horizons project. As the spacecraft approaches its rendezvous with Pluto, it will send back a "family portrait" of the Pluto system. The return of this image from the spacecraft will be used as the signal for the time capsule to be opened and shown to Earth in 2015.

Click here for the time capsule images!