New Horizons Spacecraft Gets First Images of Pluto's Moon Charon

From the depths of our solar system, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft snapped a first-of-its-kind photo: a picture of Pluto's largest moon Charon.

While still about 550 million miles away from Pluto, New Horizons is close enough to the outermost orbiting body in our solar system to snap a grainy photo of Pluto's Texas-sized moon. The image represents a milestone in the New Horizons' mission, which is the first of its kind to fly by and study Pluto and its moons. The spacecraft is expected to arrive to the planetary system two years from now, on July 14, 2015.

The spacecraft's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) telescope, the highest resolution instrument on the New Horizons, took the photo; from the bright dot in the center (Pluto) the moon appears in the 11 o'clock position as a faint speck in grainy gray background.

"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!" said New Horizons project scientist Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "We're very excited to see Pluto and Charon as separate objects for the first time from New Horizons."

New Horizons scientists used six photos taken on July 1 and July 3 to create the composite image above. While there is much room for improvement, the images are impressive considering they were taken at a distance greater than from Earth to Jupiter.

"We're excited to have our first pixel on Charon," said principle investigator Allen Stern, "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!"

Charon is the largest of Pluto's five known moons; it orbits Pluto at a distance of about 12,000 miles. It was discovered in 1978 by astronomers using the Kaj Strand Astrometric Reflector at the U.S. Naval Observatory's Flagstaff Station, according to Space.com.

Pluto's four other moons, Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos were discovered via images taken from the Hubble Space Telescope. Last week the moons Styx and Kerberos were officially given their names. Each of Pluto's moons' names references the mythical Greek underworld.

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