What's the truth on this interdasting subject? I find it hard to believe that we could get such accurate data from so far away. It's literally shooting a needle at the eye of a needle a million miles away and expecting it to go right through the eye. Look at the imagery! 30m per pixel at closest approach!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/486958_Arrokoth
And Arrokoth. Seems more like a buddy of Ashtaroth than an Indian word. I could be wrong.
But what does it matter? The whole missions smelled fishy once the Pluto information came back. High-quality pictures of Nix and Hydra, but barely any improvement of the other two tiny moons. And New Horizons didn't release a terrain map of the whole planet? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/PIA19947-NH-Pluto-Norgay-Hillary-Mountains-20150714.jpg/1280px-PIA19947-NH-Pluto-Norgay-Hillary-Mountains-20150714.jpg And this looks too fake. Mountains are cool and all but what is this? On a teeny tiny planet?
Or am I just too hyper?
Combination of trajectory and equipment. Look at the flyby trajectory. New Horizons didn't get as good a look at Kerberos or Styx as it did on Nix or Hydra. And the former are also a lot smaller.
Look at the resolutions:
Nix is ~50km across. Or about 166 pixels.
Hydra is ~51km across. Or about 65 pixels.
Kerberos is ~19 km across. Or about 11 pixels.
Styx is ~16km across. Or about 9 pixels.
(For comparison, Ultima Thule is ~36km long! The only reason we call these 'moons' is that they appear to be in reasonably stable orbits around the Pluto system.)
Hence: decent-quality images of Nix and Hydra, and somewhat terrible ones of Kerberos and Styx.
New Horizons didn't see the entire planet. Look at the flyby trajectory...
Not really. There were a lot of trajectory adjustments to guide it there - and a lot of searching for a suitable object to go to.
Other way around. Gravity limits mountain formation.
Eh. People playing games with naming is absolutely plausible. And the original name was Ultima Thule...