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Current Affairs:(Polity, Governance and International Relation)
NASA reveals first ever colour image of Pluto:
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, set to fly by the Pluto system on July 14, has sent its first colour image of the dwarf planet and its largest moon Charon.
Additional facts:
- The image reveals tantalising glimpses of this system.
- Charon is seen dimmer than Pluto in the image taken from a distance of 115 million km.
- Till date, astronomers knew about only one moon of Pluto called Charon which is nearly 50 percent as wide as the dwarf planet.
- Exactly 85 years after Pluto’s discovery, New Horizons has now spotted small moons orbiting Pluto.
- The moons, Nix and Hydra, are visible in a series of images taken by the New Horizons spacecraft at distances ranging from about 201 to 186 million km.
- The long-exposure images offer New Horizons’ best view yet of these two small moons circling Pluto which professor Clyde Tombaugh discovered at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona Feb 18, 1930.
- Nix and Hydra were discovered by New Horizons team members in Hubble Space Telescope images taken in 2005.
- Hydra, Pluto’s outermost known moon, orbits Pluto every 38 days at a distance of approximately 64,700 km while Nix orbits every 25 days at a distance of 48,700 km.
- Pluto’s two other small moons, Styx and Kerberos, are still smaller and too faint to be seen by New Horizons at its current range to Pluto.