New Horizons Spacecraft Shares Its First Look At Pluto’s Small Moons
- 9 years ago
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is still months away from reaching Pluto, but it has gotten close enough to grab some images of the former planet’s two small moons.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is still months away from reaching Pluto, but it has gotten close enough to grab some images of two of the dwarf planet’s moons.
The photos are of Nix and Hydra and were taken between late January and early February from about 120 million miles away.
Fuzzy though they may seem, they are the best pictures of the moons gathered to date.
Both celestial bodies were discovered in 2005, but due to the difficulty of analyzing objects that are both very small and far away, little is known about them.
Thus far, scientists have determined that they have orbiting cycles that last 25 and 38 days. As Hydra is the outermost moon, its trek around is the longer of the two.
Estimates put the diameters of each somewhere between 25 to 95 miles, and nailing down where in that very broad range the actu
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is still months away from reaching Pluto, but it has gotten close enough to grab some images of two of the dwarf planet’s moons.
The photos are of Nix and Hydra and were taken between late January and early February from about 120 million miles away.
Fuzzy though they may seem, they are the best pictures of the moons gathered to date.
Both celestial bodies were discovered in 2005, but due to the difficulty of analyzing objects that are both very small and far away, little is known about them.
Thus far, scientists have determined that they have orbiting cycles that last 25 and 38 days. As Hydra is the outermost moon, its trek around is the longer of the two.
Estimates put the diameters of each somewhere between 25 to 95 miles, and nailing down where in that very broad range the actu