{"id":19585,"date":"2015-10-23T23:29:34","date_gmt":"2015-10-23T15:29:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/kerberos-unleashed-at-last-plutos-dog-bone-moon-poses-another-mystery\/"},"modified":"2015-10-23T23:29:34","modified_gmt":"2015-10-23T15:29:34","slug":"kerberos-unleashed-at-last-plutos-dog-bone-moon-poses-another-mystery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/kerberos-unleashed-at-last-plutos-dog-bone-moon-poses-another-mystery\/","title":{"rendered":"Kerberos unleashed at last: Pluto\u2019s dog-bone moon poses another mystery"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Kerberos\"
This image of Kerberos was created by combining four individual images from New Horizons\u2019 Long Range Reconnaissance Imager that were captured on July 14, approximately seven hours before the spacecraft\u2019s closest approach to Pluto, at a range of 245,600 miles (396,100 kilometers) from Kerberos. The image has bee processed to recover the highest possible resolution. (Credit: NASA \/ JHUAPL \/ SwRI)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NASA\u2019s New Horizons probe has finally filled out its family portrait of Pluto and its moons \u2013 and Kerberos, the last moon to get its closeup, turns out to be nothing like what scientists expected.<\/p>\n

Before the piano-sized spacecraft\u2019s July flyby, an analysis of Kerberos\u2019 gravitational influence on Pluto\u2019s four other moons suggested that it had some heft. But the fact that it was so dim led the mission team to conclude it must have a dark surface. Otherwise, why would an object so large reflect so little light?<\/p>\n

It turns out that Kerberos is almost as tiny as Pluto\u2019s smallest moon, Styx. Like Styx, Kerberos\u2019 surface appears to consist of relatively clean water ice, making it bright enough to reflect about half of the sunlight it receives.<\/p>\n

\"pluto\"
\nScience journalist Alan Boyle<\/strong> is the author of “The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made A Big Difference.”<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce again, the Pluto system has surprised us,\u201d New Horizons\u2019 project scientist Hal Weaver, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University\u2019s Applied Physics Laboratory, said in Thursday\u2019s image advisory.<\/p>\n

The SETI Institute\u2019s Mark Showalter, a co-investigator on the New Horizons team who was one of the discoverers of Kerberos, said \u201cour predictions were nearly spot-on for the other small moons, but not for Kerberos.\u201d<\/p>\n

Showalter and his colleagues still don\u2019t fully understand how they could have been so wrong.<\/p>\n

To top it all off, the moon was apparently formed by the merger of two smaller objects, giving Kerberos a double-lobed, dog-bone shape. That\u2019s apt, considering that the moon was named after the three-headed dog of the underworld in Greek and Roman mythology. The larger lobe is about 5 miles (8 kilometers) across, and the smaller lobe is about 3 miles (5 kilometers) in widh. Kerberos\u2019 total length in the longest dimension is about 7.4 miles (12 kilometers).<\/p>\n

\"Pluto's
This composite image shows a sliver of Pluto\u2019s large moon, Charon, and all four of Pluto\u2019s small moons, as resolved by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager on the New Horizons spacecraft. All the moons are displayed with a common intensity stretch and spatial scale. Charon is by far the largest of Pluto\u2019s moons, with a diameter of 751 miles. (Credit: NASA \/ JHUAPL \/ SwRI)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The newly released pictures were taken just before New Horizons\u2019 closest approach to Pluto on July 14, and the spacecraft is now more than 74 million miles (120 million kilometers) beyond the dwarf planet. The probe is sending back gigabytes\u2019 worth of images from the July encounter as it moves on to its next target, an object called 2014 MU69 in the broad ring of icy material known as the Kuiper Belt.<\/p>\n

Today, the mission team reported that the spacecraft successfully executed the first of four maneuvers aimed at sending it past 2014 MU69 (a.k.a. Potential Target 1, or PT1) in 2019. The three other thruster firings are due to occur over the next two weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This image of Kerberos was created by combining four individual images from New Horizons\u2019 Long Range Reconnaissance Imager that were captured on July 14, approximately seven hours before the spacecraft\u2019s closest approach to Pluto, at a range of 245,600 miles (396,100 kilometers) from Kerberos. The image has bee processed to recover the highest possible resolution. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2840,3895,190,4809,2174,2848],"class_list":["post-19585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-dwarf-planets","tag-kerberos","tag-nasa","tag-nasa-new-horizons","tag-new-horizons","tag-pluto"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19585"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}