Kerberos
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New Horizons parts Pluto with a shot of its puniest moon
NASA's New Horizon's spacecraft has done yeoman's work at Pluto, having taken stunning images of the ex-planet and its major moon Charon. Now it's taking off for the largely unseen Kuiper belt, but it grabbed one last image of the tiny moon Kerberos before leaving. It turns out that the body is smaller than thought at around 8 miles across, and consists of two distinctive "lobes." Much like Comet 67P orbited by the ESA's Rosetta spacecraft, the unusual shape of Kerberos may be the result of a collision between two smaller objects. Like Pluto's other small moons, and several spots on the quasi-planet itself, it's also coated with "relatively clean water ice," making it highly reflective.
NASA probe snaps Pluto's smallest moons for the first time
Getting kicked out of the major planet club always seemed a bit unfair to Pluto, considering that it has four more moons than Earth. On the other hand, two of those, Styx and Kerberos, are so small that we only found out about them a few years ago. NASA's New Horizons probe has just taken its first snapshots of those new satellites, something of a miracle considering it was 55 million miles away and Styx is only 4 to 13 miles across. It required 10 second exposures from the probe's sensitive Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and copious image processing to reduce background glare, resulting in the animation above.
