Kerberos Revealed. This image of Kerberos was created by combining four individual Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) pictures taken on July 14, approximately seven hours before New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, at a range of 245,600 miles (396,100 km) from Kerberos.
Advertisement
The new images showed that Kerberos as two-lobed: a larger lobe that is about 5 miles across and a smaller lobe that is 3 miles in diameter.
“Our predictions were almost spot-on for other small moons, but not for Kerberos”, said New Horizons co-investigator Mark Showalter, of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
New Horizons returned images of Pluto’s tiniest moon, Kerberos, showing it to be smaller than scientists expected with a highly reflective surface.
With four course corrections, totaling 57 meters per second, New Horizons will encounter 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019.
Indeed, NASA Science Mission Directorate chief, John Grunsfeld, shares, “Even as the New Horizon’s spacecraft speeds away from Pluto out into the Kuiper Belt, and the data from the exciting encounter with this new world is being streamed back to Earth, we are looking outward to the next destination for this intrepid explorer”.
Prior to the flyby, scientists had attempted to determine Kerberos’s size by using the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the small moon’s gravitational influence on the other moons in the Pluto system. While Pluto’s other small moons are more potato-shaped, Kerberos is “double-lobed”, similar to the now-famous Comet 67P. Scientists say the brightness of its surface suggests presence of water ice on it. The images were sent back to earth last week. Nix and Hydra have comparable sizes, approximately 25 miles (40 kilometres) across in their longest dimension above. Kerberos and Styx are much smaller and have comparable sizes, roughly 6-7 miles (10-12 kilometres) across in their longest dimension.
This image made available by NASA on Friday, July 24, 2015 shows a combination of images captured by the New Horizons spacecraft with enhanced colors to show differences in the composition and texture of Pluto’s surface.
The 16-minute engine burn changed New Horizons’ trajectory by about 22.4 miles per hour (36 km/h), mission officials said.
Advertisement
That flyby would be part of an extended mission that NASA still must approve; the New Horizons team will submit a formal proposal to NASA for that mission in early 2016. All the moons are displayed with a common intensity stretch and spatial scale (see scale bar).
