Hydra (moon) the Hydra, the nine-headed serpent that battled Heracles in Greek mythology. The nine heads of Hydra are a reference to Pluto's tenure as the ninth planet; its initial, "H", refers to the Hubble Telescope, which discovered Hydra and, together with Nix, to the "New Horizons" mission whose safe passage was the motivation for taking the Hubble images. Hydra orbits the barycenter of the system in the same plane as Charon and Nix, at a distance of about 65,000 km. Its eccentricity of 0.0059 is small, but significantly non-zero, and the largest of those of Pluto's small moons (slightly larger than
Greek mythology in popular culture Lord Tennyson's "Oenone" is her lament that Paris deserted her for Helen. When poets of the German Romantic tradition, such as Friedrich Schiller, wrote about the Greek gods, their works were frequently "erotically charged", "openly sensual and hedonistic". In his poem "The Waste Land", T. S. Eliot incorporates a range of elements and inspirations from Greek mythology to pop music to Elizabethan history to create a ""tour-de-force" exposition of Western culture, from the elite to the folk to the utterly primitive". The Indian poet Henry Louis Vivian Derozio's work was heavily influenced by Greek mythology. Nina Kosman published a book