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Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most- massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume, by a small margin, but is less massive than Eris.
Moons of Pluto. The dwarf planet Pluto has five natural satellites. [1] In order of distance from Pluto, they are Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. [2] Charon, the largest, is mutually tidally locked with Pluto, and is massive enough that Pluto and Charon are sometimes considered a binary dwarf planet.
Pluto, discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, is an interesting target for planetary exploration, but Pluto presents significant challenges for exploration because of its small mass and great distance from Earth. In 1964, Gary Flandro of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory proposed a mission called Grand Tour, taking advantage of the fact that an ...
The discovery images were taken on 15 May 2005 and 18 May 2005. Hydra and Nix were independently discovered by Max J. Mutchler on 15 June 2005 and by Andrew J. Steffl on 15 August 2005. [18] The discoveries were announced on 31 October 2005, after confirmation by precovering archival Hubble images of Pluto from 2002. [19]
Nix is a natural satellite of Pluto, with a diameter of 49.8 km (30.9 mi) across its longest dimension. [3] It was discovered along with Pluto's outermost moon Hydra on 15 May 2005 by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope, [1] and was named after Nyx, the Greek goddess of the night. [10] Nix is the third moon of Pluto by distance ...
Tombaugh Regio (/ ˈ t ɒ m b aʊ ˈ r ɛ dʒ i oʊ /), sometimes nicknamed "Pluto's heart" after its shape, [2] is the largest bright surface feature of the dwarf planet Pluto. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] It lies just north of Pluto's equator, to the northeast of Belton Regio and to the northwest of Safronov Regio , which are both dark features. [ 6 ]
Maps produced from images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), together with Pluto's light curve and the periodic variations in its infrared spectra, indicate that Pluto's surface is very varied, with large differences in both brightness and color, [11] with albedos between 0.49 and 0.66. [12]
Since the first blurred images of the moon (1), images showing Pluto and Charon resolved into separate disks were taken for the first time by the Hubble Space Telescope in the 1990s (2). The telescope was responsible for the best, yet low-quality images of the moon.