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They say a penny doesn’t go far these days, to which NASA has now added its two cents.
The International Space Station (ISS) reached two pennies on Sunday (August 4), on a mission that will eventually log millions of miles. The one-hundredth US medals were launched on the “SS Francis R. ‘Dick’ Scobee,” Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus 21st cargo spacecraft, named in memory of the fallen commander of NASA’s space shuttle Challenger.
Launched from the sky by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the uncrewed capsule’s 8,200 pound (3,720 kilogram) payload was a rarity.
“The pennies will be used in a demonstration called the ‘Screaming Balloon’,” said Michele Hooks, education project manager for NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement, in an interview with collectSPACE.com. “A penny will be put into a deflated balloon, and then an astronaut will inflate the balloon and give it a whirl to compare it to a hex nut inside the second balloon.”
The “STEMonstration” is the latest in a series of educational short videos filmed on the space station aimed at engaging grade school children in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) topics. Each STEMonstration is designed so that students can reproduce the experiment in their classroom — using pennies that way.
“We wanted something simple that students could access and pennies abound,” Hooks said.
Related: Facts about Cygnus, Northrop Grumman’s cargo ship
Search for cents
Pennies are actually easy to find, assuming you’re happy with any random cent. For the coins now in space, Hooks and her team were a little more selective.
“We wanted to strike pennies in 2024 to commemorate the year they were sent into space and the year the astronauts were on the station. We also wanted them to be shiny pennies, because they will be on camera,” said Hooks.
Checking her own spare change, Hooks didn’t have a 2024 penny. She then went to her local bank and, although she went through hundreds of pennies, she could not find a cent that had been charged this year.
“The bank teller looked at me strangely until I explained, ‘These are actually going to the space station, and I need to clean them tomorrow,'” Hooks said. “So the counter started opening different rolls of pennies and other people started helping me. I don’t know how many rolls we went through, but we couldn’t find a single 2024 penny.”
Some of the enumerators questioned whether the US Mint had minted pennies this year. In fact, more than 800 million Lincoln cents had been struck and entered circulation by April. So Hooks put out the call at NASA and to his network of educators. “Who has 2024 pennies?”
“I managed to get a few from people who work at Johnson Space Center and then some from local teachers. I put them together, picked the brightest ones and those are the two that went up,” she said.
Related: International Space Station – Everything you need
A penny population
The two pennies now in space are not the first to leave Earth, but they are a rare “variation” from what is usually sent.
“From my research, I know of a US penny that was flown on Apollo 11 (by Neil Armstrong, no less) [and] A few pennies flew on Apollo 14 – one as part of a multi-coin set, and a 1948-D penny,” said Richard Jurek, co-host of the “Two Space Collectors Collecting Space” podcast and founder of The Jefferson Space Museum, a website devoted to the history of $2 bills that orbited the Earth or went to the moon.
“On Apollo 15, a 1969-D penny and a 1970-D penny were flown for members of the support team. An 1845 Cent, and an Indian Head penny (date unknown) were also flown on this mission for members of the support team.” said Jurek. (The “D” is for Denver, one of the locations where the US Mint strikes coins, as well as Philadelphia [“P”] and San Francisco [“S”].)
The first penny flown into space may also be the oldest and most valuable. A 1793 Hairflow cent – only the second style of penny issued by the US – was flown to a coin collector by the flight surgeon of the Gemini 7 crew in 1965. The already rare one-cent piece, which was packed in-flight the mission’s medical equipment (without NASA’s prior knowledge) was sold at auction 50 years later for $82,250.
In 1972, following a congressional investigation into the personal items carried by astronauts, NASA established a policy that crew members could not fly certain items, including medals, which “by their nature, provide an opportunity for the recipients to exploit themselves.” The directive still stands today, so no astronaut on a US mission has put in pennies in more than 50 years.
The same restriction applies to the Official Flight Kit (OFK), a duffel bag-sized pouch of mementos flown by NASA and its partners, as well as staff, for distribution to organizations and employees.
But the policy does not apply to robotic probes on one-way trips into space.
The longest flying penny landed on Mars in 2012. The “red hundred,” so-called because it was soon covered in Martian dust, became the calibration target for the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on the Curiosity rover. NASA.
Principal investigator Ken Edgett picked up and purchased the penny, a 1909 “VDB” cent, which includes the initials of the coin designer (Victor David Brenner) and was struck on the centenary of the birth of President Abraham Lincoln. Edgett linked it to the goal as a “tip of the hat” to geologists’ informal practice of placing a coin (or other object of known scale) in their field photographs.
RELATED STORIES:
— SpaceX launches private Cygnus cargo craft to ISS (video, photos)
— Track the ISS: How and where to see it
— Northrop Grumman names Cygnus cargo craft for the downed Challenger commander
Centes for circulation
Hooks said she was not aware of any other pennies sent by the education office. As for the current pair, they may “go into circulation” aboard the space station.
“With our educational items, especially, we look to use them as often as we can in new ways,” she said. “So I imagine you’ll see these pennies replanted as many times as we can before they return back to Earth.”
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