Good morning, and
welcome to the Day of Pluto! New Horizons has just arrived to its closest
approach, when it passed roughly as far from Pluto as New York is from Tokyo. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has been traveling for nine
and a half years, speeding ever closer to our solar system’s last major
unexplored world: Pluto. For the first time ever, scientists are getting
close-up views of the most popular dwarf planet, and today is the pinnacle of
the whole 3-billion-mile (5 billion kilometers) trip.
“If the spacecraft
observes any additional moons as we get closer to Pluto, they will be worlds
that no one has seen before.”
Drawing ever closer to Pluto in mid-May, New Horizons will begin its first search for new moons or rings that might threaten the spacecraft on its passage through the Pluto system. The images of faint Styx and Kerberos shown here are allowing the search team to refine the techniques they will use to analyze those data, which will push the sensitivity limits even deeper.
Kerberos and Styx were discovered in 2011 and 2012, respectively, by New Horizons team members using the Hubble Space Telescope. Styx, circling Pluto every 20 days between the orbits of Charon and Nix, is likely just 4 to 13 miles (7 to 21 kilometers) in diameter, and Kerberos, orbiting between Nix and Hydra with a 32-day period, is just 6 to 20 miles (10 to 30 km) in diameter. Each is 20 to 30 times fainter than Nix and Hydra.
Drawing ever closer to Pluto in mid-May, New Horizons will begin its first search for new moons or rings that might threaten the spacecraft on its passage through the Pluto system. The images of faint Styx and Kerberos shown here are allowing the search team to refine the techniques they will use to analyze those data, which will push the sensitivity limits even deeper.
Kerberos and Styx were discovered in 2011 and 2012, respectively, by New Horizons team members using the Hubble Space Telescope. Styx, circling Pluto every 20 days between the orbits of Charon and Nix, is likely just 4 to 13 miles (7 to 21 kilometers) in diameter, and Kerberos, orbiting between Nix and Hydra with a 32-day period, is just 6 to 20 miles (10 to 30 km) in diameter. Each is 20 to 30 times fainter than Nix and Hydra.
Twenty-five years in the making, this close-up examination of the Pluto system represents the capstone of the first era of planet reconnaissance.
