In today’s post we discuss the first photos of Pluto and explain why selling your insurance agency can also be a journey of discovery.
Fantasy Earth and Moon in colourful space with sunrise (Elements of this 3d image furnished by NASA – texture maps from http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/)
There were celebratory scenes on Tuesday, July 14, 2015 at NASA’s New Horizons mission control center, located at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory outside of Baltimore. Scientists were thrilled to see that their New Horizons probe had been successful in its nine-year mission to visit Pluto, considered the last unexplored world in the solar system. It shot past the ninth rock from the sun and its five small moons, Charon, Styx, Nix, Hydra and Kerberos at more than 28,000 mph at 7.49 AM. The probe is the fastest spacecraft ever to leave Earth’s orbit and came within 7,770 miles of Pluto’s surface. It took measurements of the dwarf planet as well as capturing spectacular images, which NASA has since released to the public.
This event marked a historic achievement for the U.S., as it is now the only nation to have visited every planet in the classical solar system. The images have shown that Pluto is red and orange in color and has valleys, icy mountains and craters. It will take 16 months to beam all the images back to Earth. The scientists hope to learn a lot about the planet such as how was it formed and whether or not it is still alive. In addition, the data collected will teach us about our own origins.
The mission has taken an incredible nine years to complete. New Horizons left Earth in January 2006, carrying the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto at Lowell Observatory in 1930. Everyone is fascinated by the extraordinary images collected by the probe and has praised the scientists for all their hard work. Among those to congratulate them was the world famous physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who highlighted the significance of this amazing achievement, “Billions of miles from Earth this little robotic spacecraft will show us that first glimpse of mysterious Pluto, a distant icy world on the edge of our solar system. The revelations of New Horizons may help us to understand better how our solar system was formed. We explore because we are human and we long to know.”
This has been an incredible discovery for NASA but the truth is we all make discoveries in our own lives, though they may seem much smaller than finding out new information about a planet. You might discover that you enjoy certain types of food or music that you didn’t like before or a more efficient way of doing your work. You might also discover something new when you are preparing your insurance agency for sale. When you have to look at your company through the buyer’s eyes you have to analyze both its strengths and weaknesses. It is human nature to focus on the negatives in our agencies. We lose customers to competitors. We lose employees at critical times. However, a sale forces us to focus on the positives of our agencies. Our clients love the sales process because it forces them to focus on the positive aspects of the asset that they have created. As a result, the process is actually very stimulating and not as stressful as you would expect.
