Online:
Visits:
Stories:
Profile image
By Carolyn Collins Petersen, TheSpacewriter
Contributor profile | More stories
Story Views

Now:
Last Hour:
Last 24 Hours:
Total:

Meet Mysterious Kerberos

Thursday, October 22, 2015 20:29
% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

(Before It's News)

Pluto’s Tiny Moon Ready for a Close-up

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. Courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

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. Courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

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.

New Horizons position relative to Pluto on October 22, 2015. Courtesy New Horizons mission.

New Horizons position relative to Pluto on October 22, 2015. Courtesy New Horizons mission. (Click to embiggen.)

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!

The post Meet Mysterious Kerberos appeared first on .



Source: http://thespacewriter.com/wp/2015/10/22/meet-mysterious-kerberos/

Report abuse

Comments

Your Comments
Question   Razz  Sad   Evil  Exclaim  Smile  Redface  Biggrin  Surprised  Eek   Confused   Cool  LOL   Mad   Twisted  Rolleyes   Wink  Idea  Arrow  Neutral  Cry   Mr. Green

Top Stories
Recent Stories

Register

Newsletter

Email this story
Email this story

If you really want to ban this commenter, please write down the reason:

If you really want to disable all recommended stories, click on OK button. After that, you will be redirect to your options page.