‘Family portrait’ captured of Pluto and moons
NASA’s New Horizon probe took time out from analyzing the surface features of Pluto to snap a family portrait of sorts (of at least the family we already know about), capturing the first-ever images of the dwarf planet’s smallest and faintest known moons with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument.
According to Discovery News, the spacecraft was able to create an animated sequence of five 10-second observations from a distance of more than 55 million miles (88 million kilometers). Those pictures showed all five of Pluto’s known moons: the largest one, Charon, along with its smaller companions Nix and Hydra and the recently-discovered Styx and Kerberos.
“New Horizons is now on the threshold of discovery,” John Spencer, a member of the mission science team member from the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, said in a statement Tuesday. “If the spacecraft observes any additional moons as we get closer to Pluto, they will be worlds that no one has seen before.”
Meet the “kids” – i.e. the moons of Pluto
Kerberos and Styx were first discovered in 2011 and 2012, respectively, by members of the New Horizons team using the Hubble Space Telescope. Kerberos orbits between Nix and Hydra, travels around Pluto in 32 days, and is no more than 20 miles in diameter.
On the other hand, Styx’s orbit is between those of Charon and Nix, and takes 20 days to make it around the dwarf planet. It is only 4 to 13 miles in diameter. Both moons are between 20 and 30 times fainter and Nix and Hydra, and while Kerberos can be seen in all of the images, Styx is not visible in the first one, as it was obscured by electronic artifacts in the camera.
For the sake of comparison, Discovery News pointed out that Charon is 750 miles wide, Nyx is between 29 and 85 miles wide and Hydra is between 37 and 92 miles wide. The uncertain width of each of these smaller moons should become clearer and the readings more precise as the New Horizons spacecraft draws closer to Pluto’s system en route to a July 14 flyby.
“Detecting these tiny moons from a distance of more than 55 million miles is amazing, and a credit to the team that built our LORRI long-range camera and John Spencer’s team of moon and ring hunters,” New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern from SwRI said in a statement.
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Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1113389907/%e2%80%98family-portrait%e2%80%99-captured-of-pluto-and-moons-051315/
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