The images reveal a remarkably varied surface that indicates a “complex and violent history”.
Advertisement
This impressive view of Charon was captured on July 14, 2015.
Charon looks somewhat similar to Pluto, but is only half its diameter; the moon was expected to be boring, according to NASA, but that didn’t turn out true. Instead, they have discovered a giant canyon in addition to mountains, landslides, and variations in surface colour that depict a far more diverse world than our moon.
The more we see, the more questions that seem to arise, but they are now the right sort of question that will ultimately help us nail down what made this couple so geologically different from one another.
Move over, Pluto. It’s Charon’s time to shine.
With all the recent excitement about Pluto and Mars, Pluto’s moon Charon might have gotten lost in the shuffle. That’s 4x longer than the Grand Canyon! The smoothness of the plains, as well as their grooves and faint ridges, are clear signs of wide-scale resurfacing.
“The team is discussing the possibility that an internal water ocean could have frozen long ago, and the resulting volume change could have led to Charon cracking open, allowing water-based lavas to reach the surface at that time”, explained Paul Schenk, a New Horizons scientist and researcher at Houston’s Lunar and Planetary Institute.
Higher quality images are still being transmitted over the next year. Charon’s cratered uplands at the top are broken by series of canyons, and replaced on the bottom by the rolling plains of the informally named Vulcan Planum. It is still transmitting images and data back to Earth after its close flyby, so we have plenty more pictures to look forward to.
‘I predict Charon’s story will become even more incredible, ‘ said mission Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. But that’s exactly what NASA’s New Horizons probe found spinning around everyone’s favorite once-upon-a-planet.
New Horizons launched in 2006 and is headed for the Kuiper Belt to study Pluto and its satellites.
Advertisement
A new animation also takes you on a flyover of Charon, showing its deep canyon and a tall mountain within a moat in new detail.
