NASA New Horizons Spacecraft Images Pluto's Moon, Charon

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is steadily journeying toward Pluto, the tiny dwarf planet in our solar system. Now, the spacecraft has captured its first photo of Pluto's largest moon, Charon, testing its equipment and revealing a little bit more about the distant planet.

The image was taken from nearly 550 million miles away and reveals Pluto and its moon as tiny specks amidst the contrast of space. Even so, the picture is a major milestone for the mission, which aims to characterize the global geology and morphology, map the surface composition of and to characterize the neutral atmosphere of Pluto and Charon.

"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 Hal Weaver of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in a news release. "We're very excited to see Pluto and Charon as separate objects for the first time from New Horizons."

Charon is the largest of Pluto's five known moons, orbiting the dwarf planet at roughly 12,000 miles away. In the new image, though, that's only about .01 degrees away from Pluto. Yet the fact that two distinct bodies can be seen in the picture is a huge leap forward from previous images.

"In addition to being a nice technical achievement, these new LORRI images of Charon and Pluto should provide some interesting science too," said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, in a news release. New Horizons is viewing Pluto and Charon at solar phase angles, which are the angles between the Sun, Pluto and spacecraft, that are much larger that can be achieved from observatories located on or near Earth. This means that the new pictures could potentially yield important information about the surface properties of the dwarf planet and its moon.

"We're excited to have our first pixel on Charon," said 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!"

The New Horizons spacecraft will continue its trek toward Pluto, continuing to image the planet and its moons as it approaches.