NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has successfully captured a series of images showing all the five known moons of Pluto, including the extremely faint moons Kerberos and Styx.
The spacecraft managed to capture the images at a distance of more than 55 million miles between April 25 and May 1.
"Detecting these tiny moons from a distance of more than 55 million miles [88.5 million kilometers] is amazing, and a credit to the team that built our LORRI long-range camera and [mission team member] John Spencer's team of moon and ring hunters," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in a press release.
The images clearly showed Charon, Hydra, and Nix. The mission team members had to extensively process the images of Kerberos and Styx because of the glare between the dwarf planet and Charon. The two faint moons were first discovered in 2011 and 2012 through NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
"New Horizons is now on the threshold of discovery," Spencer, who's also based at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, said in the same statement. "If the spacecraft observes any additional moons as we get closer to Pluto, they will be worlds that no one has seen before."
The mission team members plan to use the same image processing technique in exploring the surroundings of Pluto. They believe that the planet has other natural satellites aside from the known five, and they want to find out if the planet has a ring of debris that can possibly risk the mission of New Horizons, according to Discovery News.
The New Horizons spacecraft is expected to make its flyby past Pluto on July 14.
