The family portrait was so far incomplete as the craft didn’t have any image of Pluto’s tiny moon Kerberos. Stereo images will eventually provide an accurate topographic map of most of the hemisphere of Pluto seen by New Horizons during the 14 July flyby, which will be key to understanding Pluto’s geological history. The image was deconvolved to recover the highest possible spatial resolution and oversampled by a factor of eight to reduce pixilation effects.
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The new data shows that Kerberos appears to have a double-lobed shape, with the larger lobe approximately 5 miles (8 km) across and the smaller lobe approximately 3 miles (5 km) across.
Kerberos appears to be smaller than scientists expected and has a highly-reflective surface, countering predictions made prior to the Pluto flyby in July.
“Once again, the Pluto system has surprised us”, said Dr Hal Weaver from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, a project scientist for the New Horizons mission.
The reflectivity of Kerberos’ surface is similar to that of Pluto’s other small moons – approximately 50 per cent – and strongly suggests Kerberos, like the others, is coated with relatively clean water ice. The moon has two lobes, which hints that it could’ve been formed when two other, smaller icy bodies crashed and stuck together.
Little is known about PT1, even though it was discovered in 2014 by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Nasa says the new data shows that idea was incorrect although the reasons why are not yet understood.
Since the Pluto Time campaign was announced in June, NASA received nearly 7,000 image submissions from across the globe, including: the USA, Italy, New Zealand, Netherlands, Canada, Brazil, Qatar, France, Australia, Romania, India, Colombia, Venezuela, Egypt, Greece, Russia, Ireland, Scotland, Mexico, England, Malaysia, Uruguay and Spain. Pluto has a complex system of balanced satellites that surround it from all sides.
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.
All told, four maneuvers will change New Horizons’ trajectory by approximately 187 feet per second, nudging it toward a prospective close encounter with MU69 on January 1, 2019. According to NASA, the mission is the first to study the dwarf planet from a close range.
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Meanwhile, the New Horizons has much more exploring to do.
