Pluto and its largest moon Charon as recorded by NASA’s Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has taken a movie of dwarf planet Pluto (2,300 km across) and its largest moon, Charon (1,200 km across), preparing for the first visit ever to this distant mysterious system in July 2015.
Obtained with New Horizons’ best onboard telescope, termed the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), this movie records almost one complete revolution of Charon. The 12 images that comprise the movie were acquired in July, from distances varying between about 429 million km and 422 million km from Pluto. Charon is orbiting approximately 19,000 km from Pluto.
New Horizons produced this image series as part of the mission’s navigation procedures. The mission team uses these navigational images, which focus on Pluto’s position against a stellar background, to precisely adjust the path of New Horizons during its Pluto encounter. These and planned images are crucial for planning the science operations.
Pluto’s other four satellites are small and too faint to be detected in these distant images, but will start to appear in images taken next year as New Horizons nears its target.
References
New Horizons
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/
Aymen Mohamed Ibrahem
Senior Astronomy Specialist