Hubble image archive
Pluto's Moon System
These two images, taken about a week apart by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, show four moons orbiting the distant, icy dwarf planet Pluto. The green circle in both snapshots marks the newly discovered moon, temporarily dubbed P4, found by Hubble in June.P4 is the smallest moon ye...
- Date
- Jan 1, 2011
- Mission
- Hubble Space Telescope
- Archive ID
- hubblesite-images-2011-23-2881-image
These two images, taken about a week apart by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, show four moons orbiting the distant, icy dwarf planet Pluto. The green circle in both snapshots marks the newly discovered moon, temporarily dubbed P4, found by Hubble in June.
P4 is the smallest moon yet found around Pluto, with an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km). By comparison, Pluto's largest moon Charon is 746 miles (1,200 km) across. Nix and Hydra are roughly 20 to 70 miles (32 to 113 km) wide.
The new moon lies between the orbits of Nix and Hydra, two satellites discovered by Hubble in 2005. It completes an orbit around Pluto roughly every 31 days.
The moon was first seen in a photo taken with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on June 28, 2011. The sighting was confirmed in follow-up Hubble observations taken July 3 and July 18.
P4, Nix, and Hydra are so small and so faint that scientists combined short and long exposures to create this image of Pluto and its entire moon system. The speckled background is camera "noise" produced during the long exposures. The linear features are imaging artifacts.
The tiny satellite was uncovered in a Hubble survey to search for rings around the frigid dwarf planet. The observations will help NASA's New Horizons mission, scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015.
Credits
NASA, ESA, and M. Showalter (SETI Institute)Image Details
| About The Object | |
|---|---|
| Object Name | Pluto |
| Object Description | Dwarf Planet |
| Distance | Although its orbit is highly eccentric, Pluto's average distance from the Sun is 39.44 astronomical units (roughly 3.6 billion miles or 5.9 billion kilometers). |
| Dimensions | Pluto has a diameter of roughly 1,416 miles (2,280 kilometers) at the equator. |
| About The Data | |
| Data Description | This image was created from HST data from proposal : M. Showalter (SETI Institute) and D. Hamilton (University of Maryland). |
| Instrument | HST>WFC3/UVIS |
| Exposure Dates | June 28, 2011 and July 3, 2011 |
| Filters | F606W (V) |
| About The Image | |
| Color Info | This image was originally black and white and recorded only overall brightness. These brightness values were translated into a range of bluish hues. Such color "maps" can be useful in helping to distinguish subtly-varying brightness in an image. The colors in this image are not what human eyes would see looking at Pluto. |
Downloads
Source
Image and source material are credited to the official mission archive linked below.
View on NASA.gov