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 mythology to the indigenous pre-Greek societies: Crete, Mycenae, Pylos, Thebes and Orchomenus. Historians of religion were fascinated by a number of apparently ancient configurations of myth connected with Crete (the god as bull, Zeus and Europa, Pasiphaë who yields to the bull and gives birth to the Minotaur, etc.). Martin P. Nilsson asserts, based on the representations and general function of the gods, that a lot of Minoan gods and religious conceptions were fused in the Mycenaean religion. and concluded that all great classical Greek myths were tied to Mycenaean centres and anchored in prehistoric times. Nevertheless, according to Burkert,