New Horizons Pluto Probe Heads Toward 2nd Flyby Target

With images of Kerberos released, the family portrait of Pluto’s system is now complete. It was taken from about 245,600 miles (396,100 km) away, just seven hours before the spacecraft’s closest approach to Pluto back in July.

Smaller than scientists thought, Kerberos is about 7.4 miles (12 km) across on its longer side and about 2.8 miles (4.5 km) across on its shorter side.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has carried out the first in a series of four initial targeting maneuvers created to send it toward 2014 MU69 – a small Kuiper Belt object about a billion miles beyond Pluto, which the spacecraft historically explored in July. The larger of the lobes is approximately about five miles (eight kilometers) wide, while the other is about three miles (five kilometers) across.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has begun chasing down another distant, icy object.

“Once again, the Pluto system has surprised us”, said Hal Weaver, New Horizons Project Scientist from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.

The reflectivity of Kerberos’ surface is similar to that of Pluto’s other small moons (approximately 50 percent) and strongly suggests Kerberos, like the others, is coated with relatively clean water ice. Its faintness was ascribed to a suspected coating of dark surface material. These breathtaking images of the Pluto’s moon were captured by Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), a camera aboard New Horizons.

“Our predictions were almost spot-on for the other small moons, but not for Kerberos”, said Mark Showalter, New Horizons co-investigator of the SETI Institute.

Because Kerberos was found to have a strong gravitational influence on its companions in spite of being very faint, the scientists speculated it was larger and more massive than it appeared to be.

Kerberos is the second-outermost of Pluto’s five moons, and at a distance of 60,000 kilometers from the dwarf planet, it is located between Nix and Hydra and beyond the orbits of Charon and Styx, according to BBC News.

Early target selection was important; the team needs to direct New Horizons toward the object this year in order to perform any extended mission with healthy fuel margins.

The low-resolution picture of Kerberos (seen below) is actually made of four separate images taken by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI.