Much has been made about New Horizons' flyby of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, but the satellite is also delivering images of the dwarf planet's moons.
Charon is the closest moon to Pluto and was also in plain view for New Horizons when it made its historic approach, but the probe has still focused its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) has looked far beyond to the likes of Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra.
NASA released new images of Nix and Hydra, the former in color, whereas the latter is now seen in enhanced detail. NASA previously released an image of Hydra that was highly pixelated.
"Before last week, Hydra was just a faint point of light, so it's a surreal experience to see it become an actual place, as we see its shape and spot recognizable features on its surface for the first time," Ted Stryk, a collaborating scientist at Roane State Community College in Tennessee, said in the release.
NASA plans to be able to unveil images of the two remaining Pluto moons, Styx and Kerberos, by mid-Oct.
"Additional compositional data has already been taken of Nix, but is not yet downlinked. It will tell us why this region is redder than its surroundings," Carly Howett, a New Horizons mission scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in the release. "This observation is so tantalizing, I'm finding it hard to be patient for more Nix data to be downlinked."
