Interplanetary space probe New Horizons has sent the images of Pluto’s moon Kerberos, which appears to be smaller than scientists expected and has a highly-reflective surface.
Kerberos appears to have a double-lobed shape, around 12 km in its long dimension and 4.5 km in its shortest dimension, US space agency NASA said in a statement. “Once again, the Pluto system has surprised us,” said New Horizons project scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. An image of Kerberos was created by combining four Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) pictures taken on July 14.
The new data was downlinked from the New Horizons spacecraft on October 20. Scientists speculate from its unusual shape that Kerberos could have been formed by the merger of two smaller objects.
