NASA sends spacecraft to Pluto

I was interviewed about the discovery of Nix and Hydra in this NPR story just before the launch of New Horizons. A partial transcript:

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

If all goes well, NASA will launch the first spacecraft to Pluto today. The New Horizons probe will be launched on the fastest interplanetary rocket ever. Even so, Pluto is so far away the probe won't get there for nearly a decade. Pluto is the last of the nine familiar planets to be visited by a spacecraft and the program made a major discovery even before leaving the ground. NPR's Richard Harris explains.

RICHARD HARRIS reporting:

If you were in charge of a $650 million mission to Pluto, you'd probably want to make sure that your precious spacecraft didn't run into a nasty cloud of debris along the way, and indeed, last May, the astronomers planning the New Horizons mission used the Hubble Space Telescope to look around for extra objects orbiting Pluto just in case. Max Mutchler from the Space Telescope Science Institute says the astronomer who asked for the pictures was then too busy to look at them.

Mr. MAX MUTCHLER (Space Telescope Science Institute): About the middle of June, he gave it to me, and within a day, I discovered these two new moons.

HARRIS: That makes three moons now for Pluto. It also has a large moon called Charon discovered years ago. The new ones announced on Halloween have yet to be named.

Mr. MUTCHLER: They're very small. They're 1/12th the size of Charon. They are 5,000 times fainter than Charon, so it's not surprising they haven't been discovered earlier. They're surprisingly close in.