NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has taken the first ever family portrait of Pluto and all of its moons, including the faintest of its known moons.
New Horizons is currently speeding toward an historic flyby of Pluto on July 14, but the probe has already taken a series of images from April 25 through May 1 using its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager camera. These new shots mark the first time New Horizons has managed to resolve the extremely faint Pluto moons of Kerberos and Styx.
"Detecting these tiny moons from a distance of more than 55 million miles [88.5 million kilometers] is amazing, and a credit to the team that built our LORRI long-range camera and [mission team member] John Spencer's team of moon and ring hunters," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.
Pluto has five known satellites - Charon, Hydra, Nix, Kerboros and Styx. At 648 miles in diameter, Charon is almost half as wide as Pluto, but the other four moons are tiny. Kerberos and Styx, for example, are thought to be just 4 to 13 miles and 6 to 20 miles wide, respectively.
The four tiny moons are each visible individually in the image, while Charon melds with Pluto in the much brighter blur at the center of the other orbits. Scientists working on the project processed the images extensively to reduce the Pluto-Charon glare and reveal the small moons.
"New Horizons is now on the threshold of discovery," Spencer, who's also based at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, said in the same statement. "If the spacecraft observes any additional moons as we get closer to Pluto, they will be worlds that no one has seen before."
The $700 million New Horizons mission originally launched in January 2006 to conduct the first close reconnaissance of Pluto and its moons. Pluto has remained shrouded in mystery since it was first discovered in 1930 because of its size and its distance from the sun; even the best images from Hubble show the dwarf planet as a mere blur of pixels.
However, scientists are looking to change that with New Horizons. On July 14, Pluto will finally come into focus as the probe will pass by the dwarf planet and its moon at a distance of just 7,800 miles. When it does, you can expect to see a flurry of new images as we finally get a closer look at the icy surface of the dwarf planet situated so far from the sun.
