01. Charon Moon Data Mass (kg) 1.90e+21 Radius (km) 586 Density (gm/cm3) 1.83 Distance from Pluto (km) 19,640 Period of rotation (days) 6.38725 Period of orbit (days) 6.38725 Orbital velocity (km/sec) 0.23 Eccentricity of orbit 0.00 Inclination of orbit (°) 98.80 Escape velocity (km/sec) 0.610 Visual albedo 0.5 Visual magnitude 16.8 Discovered: 1978 J.Cristy
Pluto Moons
03. Hydra Discovered: 2005 HA.Weaver, SA.Stern, et al
02. Nix Discovered: 2005 HA.Weaver, SA.Stern, et al
TOTAL MOONS 5
Dwarf Planet - System
04. P4 Discovered: 2011 New Horizon Project
05. P5 Discovered: 2012 Hubble telescope
PLUTO UPDATE JULY 3 2011 - Fourth Moon Discovered
PLUTO UPDATE JULY 11 2012
A tiny new moon has been discovered orbiting Pluto, scientists announced today (July 11.2012).
Researchers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope found the moon, bringing the number of known Pluto satellites to five. The discovery comes almost exactly one year after Hubble spotted Pluto's fourth moon, a tiny body currently called P4. "Just announced: Pluto has some company -- We've discovered a 5th moon using the Hubble Space Telescope!" Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., announced via the Twitter social networking website
Pluto is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, a donut-shaped region of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. There may be millions of these icy objects, collectively referred to as Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) or trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), in this distant region of our solar system.
Pluto – which is smaller than Earth’s Moon – has a heart-shaped glacier that’s the size of Texas and Oklahoma. This fascinating world has blue skies, spinning moons, mountains as high as the Rockies, and it snows – but the snow is red.
On July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made its historic flight through the Pluto system – providing the first close-up images of Pluto and its moons and collecting other data that has transformed our understanding of these mysterious worlds on the solar system’s outer frontier.
In the years since that groundbreaking flyby, nearly every conjecture about Pluto possibly being an inert ball of ice has been thrown out the window or flipped on its head.
“It’s clear to me that the solar system saved the best for last!” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado. “We could not have explored a more fascinating or scientifically important planet at the edge of our solar system. The New Horizons team worked for 15 years to plan and execute this flyby and Pluto paid us back in spades!”