Pluto's 3 Moons and a Probe to Study Them

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday October 31, 2005 @10:27AM from the still-trying-to-thumb-a-ride dept.

It doesn't come easy writes "For those of you keeping score, Pluto now officially has three moons, with more possibly to follow. The newfound moons orbit about 27,000 miles (44,000 kilometers) from Pluto, more than twice as far as Charon, Pluto's other satellite. They are 5,000 times dimmer than Charon. The moons were found using the Hubble Space Telescope. For now, Pluto is the only Kuiper Belt object known to have satellites. Some nice images of Pluto and its moons are included in links. Enjoy!" Relatedly IZ Reloaded writes "NASA says the Atlas 5 rocket that will carry the New Horizons Pluto probe has suffered slight damage thanks to Hurricane Wilma. New Scientist reports: "The Atlas 5 rocket stands within a construction hangar at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Florida's east coast. As Wilma rolled though the region on 24 October, fierce 122-kilometer-per-hour winds tore holes in the hangar's 83-meter-tall door and caused minor damage to the rocket inside.""

2 of 143 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Nice? by lucabrasi999 · 2005-10-31 10:30 · Score: 4, Interesting

some nice images of Pluto and its moons are included in links
Nice? The photographs are a bunch of small white dots! Does anyone else see real photographs? I guess he is referring to the "artistic conceptual drawings"
Re:Kinda small... by l2718 · 2005-10-31 11:01 · Score: 3, Interesting

These "moons" are only 30 and 100 miles across. Mars' Phobos and Deimos, widely thought to be captured asteroids, are thousands of kilometers across.

You are way out of the ballpark, I'm afraid. These two new moon are larger than Phobos (diameter approx. 22Km) and Deimos (diameter approx. 12Km). The Earth (and its moon) Mars, Venus, Mercury, the Galilean Moons and Titan are thousands of kilometers across, but everything else is much smaller. Ceres (the largest asteriod) is only 914Km across.