P51A-2031
Shapes and Rotations of the Small Satellites of Pluto

Friday, 18 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Simon Porter1, Mark Showalter2, John R Spencer1, Harold A Weaver Jr3, Richard P Binzel4, Douglas P Hamilton5, S Alan Stern6, Catherine Olkin1, Leslie Ann Young1, Kimberly Ennico Smith7 and The New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Science Theme Team, (1)Southwest Research Institute Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, (2)SETI Institute Mountain View, Mountain View, CA, United States, (3)Applied Physics Laboratory Johns Hopkins, Laurel, MD, United States, (4)MIT Rm 54-410, Cambridge, MA, United States, (5)University of Maryland College Park, College Park, MD, United States, (6)Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, CO, United States, (7)NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, United States
Abstract:
Pluto-Charon is a binary dwarf planet surrounded by four much smaller satellites: Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra (in order of increasing distance from the barycenter). These satellites were discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope, which also showed that their orbits are nearly circular around the system barycenter and coplanar to the central binary. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew through the Pluto system on July 14, 2015, and obtained the first resolved images of all four small satellites. We will present initial models for the shapes and sizes of the small satellites determined from both those resolved images and earlier unresolved high-cadence images. We will also explore the implications of these shapes on the formation and rotational evolution of the satellites.
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