HYDRA CLOSE-UP: NEW HORIZONS PROBE CAPTURES PLUTO'S TINY MOON (STA BREAKING NEWS and ARCHIVES)

by STANews , Wednesday, September 17, 2014, 17:36

A pair of small moons that NASA's Hubble Space Telescope discovered orbiting Pluto now have official names: Nix and Hydra. Photographed by Hubble in 2005, Nix and Hydra are roughly 5,000 times fainter than Pluto and are about two to three times farther from Pluto than its large moon, Charon, which was discovered in 1978. (NASA/ESA)

The fact that the LORRI camera managed to capture such a small space object from such a huge distance gave the New Horizons team confidence that, if there the probe meets an obstacle, they’ll notice it beforehand.

“Using those techniques, Hydra popped right out of the data, though it’s still very faint — several times fainter than the faintest objects the New Horizons camera was designed to detect — and still very close to Pluto,” John Spencer, of the Southwest Research Institute and member of the New Horizons Science Team, told the Discovery science news outlet.

“We’re thrilled to see it, because it shows that our satellite-search techniques work, and that our camera is operating superbly. But it’s also exciting just to see a third member of the Pluto system come into view, as proof that we’re almost there!” he added.

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