New Horizons: NASA Releases Image of Pluto’s Smallest Moon Kerberos

Since then, the probe has beamed back images and data about Pluto.

This image, taken by Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope, shows five moons orbiting the distant, icy dwarf planet Pluto.

According to BBC News, New Horizons captured the image of Kerberos with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI). They even oversampled the image by a factor of eight to reduce pixilation effects. It measures just 7.4 miles (12 kilometers) across and 2.8 miles (4.5 kilometers) on its shortest side.

NASA experts said the Pluto moon appeared to be smaller than what scientists expected and it also has a highly-reflective surface, counter to predictions prior to the Pluto flyby in July.

Flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland initiated the first of four maneuvers Thursday that are needed to change the probe’s trajectory toward an object elsewhere in the Kuiper Belt.

The smallest moon of Pluto is Kerberos, this lumpy little mess of rock that looks like two moons got stuck together and now go by the hyphenate hybrid-name Ker-Beros as an inseparable celebrity couple. The unusual shape has scientists suspecting it may have been formed from the merger of two smaller objects.

Now that New Horizons has finished its Pluto fly-by, it is hoped that the next leg of its journey will to explore the Kuiper belt.

The Pluto Time idea stemmed from a frequently-asked question of New Horizons scientists: How are you going to take pictures of Pluto, given that it is so far from the sun?

The new results are expected to lead to a better understanding of Pluto’s satellite system. APL designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

“We realised that we could make a web tool that would estimate approximately when the light levels dropped to Pluto levels”, said Alex Parker, research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.

‘Moreover, this KBO costs less fuel to reach [than other candidate targets], leaving more fuel for the flyby, for ancillary science, and greater fuel reserves to protect against the unforeseen’. It sits between Nix and Hydra, and beyond the orbits of Styx and the much larger Charon, the dominant moon in the system.