Approximately 90 million km from reaching Pluto, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft returned a photo of the planet and its four faint moons.
According to BBC News, the new image is the first time New Horizons captured the moons Kerberos and Styx. Heading toward the outermost planet in the solar system, the spacecraft has already taken photos of Charon, Pluto's largest and brightest moon, as well as the other two faint ones, Nix and Hydra.
"New Horizons is now on the threshold of discovery," New Horizons science team member John Spencer, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a press release. "If the spacecraft observes any additional moons as we get closer to Pluto, they will be worlds that no one has seen before."
Kerberos and Styx were not discovered until 2011 and 2012, respectively, thanks to contributions to the New Horizons mission from the Hubble Telescope. The spacecraft snapped their photo using its ultra-sensitive Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI).
New Horizons is expected to make its historic rendezvouses with Pluto in July, but NASA released LORRI images of Nix and Hydra in Feb. to mark the 85th anniversary of Clyde Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto.
"Detecting these tiny moons from a distance of more than 55 million miles is amazing," New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, said in the release, "and a credit to the team that built our LORRI long-range camera and John Spencer's team of moon and ring hunters."
