The Hubble Space Telescope is best known for looking deep into space, collecting images that have helped shape our present understanding of the universe. It can also be useful closer to home, however.
In 2006, Hubble was used to find two small moons of Pluto to go with the large one already known. This summer, Hubble has identified a fourth moon that is even smaller. Astronomers put it at anywhere from 8 to 20 miles across. They speculate that the moons were formed when a large body slammed into Pluto. That may be, but so far from the Sun, with so few large bodies roaming such a vast volume of space, such collisions must be much less frequent than they are in the inner System.
The New Horizons probe is currently on its way to Pluto, to arrive in 2015, so we should get a close-up view of Pluto and its emerging family of moons fairly soon.
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