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New Horizons: "I can see your moon from here!"
From Phil Plait's blog: New Horizons Gets a First Glimpse of Pluto's Moon Charon:
File this under “OK, this is pretty cool”: The New Horizons spacecraft, currently just under 900 million kilometers (550 million miles) from Pluto, took its first picture of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon!
In the picture, Charon is to the upper left of Pluto. In the right-hand frame, the circles mark the predicted positions of the two objects given the positions of New Horizons, the two worlds, and the pointing of the camera. Not bad.
New Horizons was launched in January 2006, and will zip past Pluto and its retinue of moons in July 2015. It still has a long way to go; 900 million kilometers isn’t exactly an afternoon stroll. It’s well past the orbit of Uranus now, and even though it’s moving at a fantastic 15 kilometers per second (32,000 miles per hour, fast enough to cross the entire Earth in 15 minutes) it still has two years to go.
Charon may turn out to be at least as interesting as Pluto itself. Near-infrared observations of Charon by the Gemini Observatory indicate the presence of cryo-volcanoes/cryo-geysers on Charon's surface.
