NASA released an image of Pluto's smallest moon, Kerberos, from the New Horizons flyby of Pluto and its five satellites.
According to BBC News, New Horizons captured the image of Kerberos with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI). NASA scientists noticed two distinct lobes making up Kerberos' shape, the larger one measuring eight kilometers and the smaller one measuring five kilometers.
"Our predictions were nearly spot-on for the other small moons, but not for Kerberos," New Horizons co-investigator Mark Showalter, of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., said in a press release.
In addition to its several high resolution images of Pluto, NASA has now released images of all the distant dwarf planet's five moons: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Styx, and Kerberos. New Horizons is continuing to float deeper into space and is now some five billion kilometers from Earth, BBC News noted.
NASA is currently planning what the spacecraft will observe next while also sifting through the data downlinked from its historic flyby of the Pluto system.
"Before the New Horizons encounter with Pluto, researchers had used Hubble Space Telescope images to 'weigh' Kerberos by measuring its gravitational influence on its neighboring moons," NASA stated in its release. "That influence was surprisingly strong, considering how faint Kerberos was. They theorized that Kerberos was relatively large and massive, appearing faint only because its surface was covered in dark material. But the small, bright-surfaced Kerberos--now revealed in these new images - shows that the idea was incorrect, for reasons that are not yet understood."
