Pluto’s Tiny Moon Ready for a Close-up

It may not look like much, but this is the long-awaited view of Pluto’s tiny moon Kerberos. This little place is about 12 kilometers across, and has what looks like a double-lobed shape — as if two tiny chunks of “stuff” had slammed together to make a bigger one. The bigger of the two lobes is about kilometers across and the smaller is about 3 kilometers and the images and data taken with New Horizons show that Kerberos is highly reflective and coated with what appears to be water ice.

Pluto has five moons — Charon, Styx, Nyx, Hydra and Kerberos. All of them were imaged by the spacecraft, which is still streaming data to Earth (and will be for the next year or so).

What’s Up with New Horizons?

Since I haven’t written about Pluto and New Horizons for a while, let’s take a look at what else is happening with the mission. First, the spacecraft just did the first of four maneuvers to put the spacecraft on a path toward 2014 MU69, a Kuiper Belt object about a billion miles away from Pluto. The mission team is preparing a proposal for those observations, which will take place on January 1, 2019 as the spacecraft flies by on its way through the Belt. Three more trajectory course correction maneuvers will take place in the next two weeks.

Second, as I mentioned above, as it flies away from Pluto, the spacecraft is playing back the data from the July encounter and will be doing so until autumn 2016. The images and data are coming back at around a 1.12 kilobits per second to an antenna at the Deep Space Network.

Finally, each week the mission team is releasing some pretty amazing images from the Pluto flyby. Check out the science image gallery at the mission’s Web site, and browse to your heart’s content. I guarantee it — you’ll be agog at what this fast-moving little mission has found at Pluto. And, if all goes well, we’ll get to see another KBO in just a few years. It’s the gift that keeps on giving!