NASA’s New Horizon probe took time out from analyzing the surface features of Pluto to snap a family portrait of sorts (of at least the family we already know about), capturing the first-ever images of the dwarf planet’s smallest and faintest known moons with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument.
According to Discovery News, the spacecraft was able to create an animated sequence of five 10-second observations from a distance of more than 55 million miles (88 million kilometers). Those pictures showed all five of Pluto’s known moons: the largest one, Charon, along with its smaller companions Nix and Hydra and the recently-discovered Styx and Kerberos.
“New Horizons is now on the threshold of discovery,” John Spencer, a member of the mission science team member from the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, said in a statement Tuesday. “If the spacecraft observes any additional moons as we get closer to Pluto, they will be worlds that no one has seen before.”
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