NASA's New Horizons spacecraft captured its first photograph of Pluto's largest moon Charon almost 550 million miles away, according to Space.com.
The spacecraft is set to "fly" by Pluto in July 2015, but the image captured shows Charon as a dim object separate from the brighter Pluto. NASA launched the $700 million New Horizons mission in January 2006
"The image itself might not look very impressive to the untrained eye, but compared to the discovery images of Charon from Earth, these 'discovery' images from New Horizons look great!" New Horizons project scientist Hal Weaver of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md, told Space.com. "We're very excited to see Pluto and Charon as separate objects for the first time from New Horizons."
According to Space.com, the dwarf planet has five known moons: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos. Charon is the largest moon and orbits Pluto at a distance of about 12,000 miles, discovered in 1978 by astronomers using the Kaj Strand Astrometric Reflector at the U.S. Naval Observatory's Flagstaff Station.
Images of the other four moons were taken with the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft contains a Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) that was used to snap six different photos of Charon and Pluto. The sciencts took the photos to create a single composite view, Space.com reports.
"In addition to being a nice technical achievement, these new LORRI images of Charon and Pluto should provide some interesting science too," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado said in a statement.
The spacecraft is about 550 million from Pluto, but is expected to beut it will be much closer on July 14, 2015, when it makes its closest approach to Pluto and its moons. On that day, the spacecraft zoom within 7,750 miles (12,500 km) of Pluto and should provide spectacular views of the dwarf planet and its moons.
"We're excited to have our first pixel on Charon," Stern said, "but two years from now, near closest approach, we'll have almost a million pixels on Charon - and I expect we'll be about a million times happier too."
