WASHINGTON - America's first round, five-sided and hologram stamps will be issued next month, the Postal Service announced Tuesday.
The new issues will be released at World Stamp Expo 2000, being held in Anaheim, Calif.
A ''Space Achievement and Exploration'' stamp will be issued July 7. The round stamp will bear a hologram of Earth, using images supplied by NASA. It is both the first round stamp issued by the United States, as well as the first hologram stamp, although there have been stamped envelopes with holograms issued.
The stamp will cover the $11.75 Express mail rate.
On July 8 a second hologram stamp will be issued, also at the $11.75 rate, featuring a hologram of a lunar lander, based on computer images and a three-dimensional model from NASA.
Two ''Escaping the Gravity of Earth'' hologram stamps will be issued July 9. The Priority Mail rate -$3.20 - stamps feature holograms of the International Space Station.
On July 10, six ''Probing the Vastness of Space'' stamps will be issued. These 60-cent international rate stamps depict an illustration of the Hubble Space Telescope and photographs of the Very Large Array telescope system on the Plains of San Agustin, near Socorro, N.M.; twin 10-meter optical and infrared telescopes at Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii; optical telescopes at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory near La Serena, Chile; the 100-inch optical telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, Calif.; and a 305-meter radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
July 11 marks the first day for five ''Exploring the Solar System'' stamps, the first five-sided stamps in U.S. postal history.
These $1 stamps present an image of a solar eclipse from a satellite, an illustrated cutaway view of the sun, a digitally restored NASA image of sunrise from space, an image of a solar eruption taken by Skylab and a photo from Earth of the sun in a partly cloudy sky.
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On the Net: U.S. Postal Service: http://new.usps.com/cgi-bin/uspsbv/scripts/front.jsp
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