LONDON: NASA released the best colour pictures yet of Charon on Thursday.The images were taken during a Pluto flyby on July 14 and reached Earth September 21.
Numerous scientists had expected Charon to have a monotonous surface covered with craters, the agency said.
Charon’s surface turns out to be very irregular with mountains, craters, and a giant 1000 mile-long canyon stretching across the middle. “I predict Charon’s story will become even more unbelievable!” said mission Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, on the impact new images could have.
This image released by NASA yesterday, shows Pluto’s moon Charon, in enhanced color by captured by NASA’s New Horizons. The details shown in the high-resolution images raise more questions than answers. The chasm is also much deeper at certain points as well. The new theory envisions at a time when this ocean started to freeze, resulting in an overall volume increase, thus pushing the crust of the moon to split open.
Perhaps my favorite in the series, however, is this handsome composite of Pluto and Charon, in which both were processed in exactly the same fashion to allow scientists to make direct comparisons between the two. The ones to the north carry more large craters than the ones to the south, which suggests that they are older.
NASA cites possible cryovolcanism (a.k.a. cold volcanic activity, a.k.a. one of the coolest-sounding things ever) as a possible culprit for the moon’s disparate complexion.
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