And the blurry image came with a surprise. Scientists think that the unusual shape of Kerberos could have been formed by the merger of two smaller objects.
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The concept stemmed from a question the team had received time and time again: how will you take pictures of Pluto when it is so far from the sun? Pluto’s satellite Kerberos, however, looks more like an oversized cosmic potato, and not even an ideally shaped one for that matter. New Horizons’ science team believes the double-lobed shape could be the result of two objects merging.
Scientists also found that Kerberos, much like its siblings, has a reflective surface which can be attributed to “relatively clean water ice”.
“Pluto is weird, in a good way”, says Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
Meet Kerberos, the smallest of Pluto’s five moons.
Kerberos was discovered by the Pluto Companion Search Team using the Hubble Space Telescope on 28 June 2011. “That influence was surprisingly strong, considering how faint Kerberos was”. This is surprising for Kerberos: the faint little moon exerts a relatively high gravitation wallop on its orbital neighbours, leading researchers to initially theorize that it was larger but darker.
“Nasa has unveiled stunning mosaics of Pluto and its largest moon Charon, representing the global response to its popular “#PlutoTime” social media campaign.
Our predictions were almost spot-on for the other small moons, but not for Kerberos. The first study from the mission has just arrived a week ago. After these preliminary operations will be performed, the spacecraft’s direction will be shifted by roughly 180 feet per second, propelling it towards a potential near trajectory with MU69 in 2019. They have designed and built the New Horizons spacecraft. The spacecraft remains in excellent health following a 3 billion-mile (4.8 billion kilometer) journey and still holds a year’s worth of scientific data for transmission back to Earth.
NASA has released the best images of Kerberos, Pluto’s smallest moon. Scientists estimate MU69 is just under 30 miles across. That’s about 10 times larger than the comet the Rosetta mission is orbiting.
New Horizons was originally created to fly beyond the Pluto system and explore additional Kuiper Belt objects.
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Like Pluto, 2014 MU69 lies in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of frigid bodies past Neptune.
