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Pluto, the farthest planet from the Sun, must have a bit of a complex. With recent discoveries of large Kuiper Belt objects, some people have been trying to relegate Pluto’s status from planet to non-planet. Well, the controversy’s sure to get a little more heated with the recent discovery of two more satellites orbiting Pluto, bringing its number of satellites up to three.

Hubble Space Telescope data taken between 15 and 18 May 2005 first spotted the satellites, but in only two observations. Two data points aren’t enough to pin down an orbit, so more data was needed. Unfortunately the HST entered what’s called “2-gyro mode”, which limited the amount of sky it could look at, and Pluto will be outside of this zone until February 2006. Luckily HST’s data are archived, and data taken of Pluto on 14 June 2002 showed the faint presence of these two satellites. This is considered hard confirmation of the satellites.

The satellites currently have the romantic names S/2005 P1 and S/2005 P2.

The Department of Space Studies of the Southwest Research Institute has a good background page on the hunt for the two new satellites of Pluto