NASA releases new images of two of Pluto’s moons

The first close up hits of Pluto expose summits fabricated from glaciers along with a really early, crater-free material, specialists with the use of NASA’s New Horizons dream said on Wednesday. The color image of Nix is from data obtained by the Ralph instrument on New Horizons from July 14 at a range of 102,000 miles.

The team already thinks it can make out a bulls-eye pattern around the gray moon’s red spot, so its guess is that it’s some kind of impact crater.

Two of Pluto’s mini-moons, the mysterious Nix and Hydra, have transitioned from featureless points of light into their own worlds with new imagery from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. “It will tell us why this region is redder than its surroundings”, New Horizons mission scientist Carly Howett, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement today (July 21).

The two moons, discovered in a Hubble Space Telescope in 2005, are about the same size.

The new image of Nix shows a region with a reddish hue (though the image has been enhanced) that measures about 42 km long by 36 km long.

“This observation is so tantalizing, I’m finding it hard to be patient for more Nix data to be downlinked”, she added.

Hydra, Pluto’s most distant moon, has a highly irregular shape, and is about 25 miles (40 km) wide and 34 miles (55 km) long.

While Nix is roughly potato shaped (admittedly, most small moons can be described this way), NASA compares the unusual shape of Hydra to the state of Michigan.

Two of Pluto’s small satellites are getting their moment in the Sunday.

Researchers, and the rest of humanity, finally got their first up-close look at these far-flung bodies when New Horizons zoomed through the Pluto system on July 14, coming within 7,800 miles (12,500 km) of the dwarf planet’s surface. But those images will not be downlinked to Earth until as late as mid-October.

New Horizons will now spend more than a year sending back all of the photos and other data it took during the flyby.