NASA's Hubble Discovers Another Moon Around Pluto
Hubble Space Telescope's keen vision has found yet another moon orbiting the distant, icy dwarf planet Pluto. This discovery expands the size of Pluto's known satellite system to four moons. The tiny, new satellite — temporarily designated P4 — was uncovered in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the frigid dwarf planet.
The new moon is the smallest moon yet discovered around Pluto. It has an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km). By comparison, Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is 746 miles (1,200 km) across, and the other moons, Nix and Hydra are in the range of 20 to 70 miles in diameter (32 to 113 km).
"I find it remarkable that Hubble's cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles (5 billion km)," said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who led this observing program with Hubble.
The full news release story Here
Wed Jul 20, 2011 7:46 pm