Moons of Pluto meters per pixel were returned of Nix and up to 1.1 kilometers per pixel of Hydra. Lower-resolution images were returned of Styx and Kerberos. Author Edmond Hamilton referred to three moons of Pluto in his 1940 novel "Calling Captain Future", naming them , , and . Charon was listed as the largest of them. All three moons would not be discovered until the year 1970, according to Hamilton. The real Charon was discovered in 1978. Moons of Pluto The dwarf planet Pluto has five moons down to a detection limit of about 1 km in diameter. In order of distance
Dwarf planet which made Pluto by far the smallest planet. Although it was still more than ten times as massive as the largest object in the asteroid belt, Ceres, it had one-fifth the mass of Earth's Moon. Furthermore, having some unusual characteristics, such as large orbital eccentricity and a high orbital inclination, it became evident that it was a different kind of body from any of the other planets. In the 1990s, astronomers began to find objects in the same region of space as Pluto (now known as the Kuiper belt), and some even farther away. Many of these shared several of