Category: Wondrous Things

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has returned the best color and the highest resolution images yet of Pluto's largest moon, Charon—and these pictures show a surprisingly complex and violent history.

At half the diameter of Pluto, Charon is the largest satellite relative to its planet in the solar system. Many New Horizons scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; instead, they're finding a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations and more.

"We thought the probability of seeing such interesting features on this satellite of a world at the far edge of our solar system was low," said Ross Beyer, an affiliate of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team from the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, "but I couldn't be more delighted with what we see."

This composite of enhanced color images of Pluto (lower right) and Charon (upper left), was taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft as it passed through the Pluto system on July 14, 2015. This image highlights the striking differences between Pluto and Charon. The color and brightness of both Pluto and Charon have been processed identically to allow direct comparison of their surface properties, and to highlight the similarity between Charon's polar red terrain and Pluto's equatorial red terrain. Pluto and Charon are shown with approximately correct relative sizes, but their true separation is not to scale. The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the spacecraft's Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC). Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

High-resolution images of the Pluto-facing hemisphere of Charon, taken by New Horizons as the spacecraft sped through the Pluto system on July 14 and transmitted to Earth on Sept. 21, reveal details of a belt of fractures and canyons just north of the moon's equator. This great canyon system stretches more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across the entire face of Charon and likely around onto Charon's far side. Four times as long as the Grand Canyon, and twice as deep in places, these faults and canyons indicate a titanic geological upheaval in Charon's past.

"It looks like the entire crust of Charon has been split open," said John Spencer, deputy lead for GGI at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "With respect to its size relative to Charon, this feature is much like the vast Valles Marineris canyon system on Mars."

Even higher-resolution Charon images and composition data are still to come as New Horizons transmits data, stored on its digital recorders, over the next year – and as that happens, "I predict Charon's story will become even more amazing!" said mission Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

The New Horizons spacecraft is currently 3.1 billion miles (5 billion kilometers) from Earth, with all systems healthy and operating normally.

New Horizons is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. APL designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the science mission, payload operations, and encounter science planning.

The really good pictures of Pluto from NASA's New Horizons probe are starting to trickle in, and they are fucking breathtaking.

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While data and pictures will be downloading for the next sixteen months, NASA's New Horizons probe already provided humanity with some astoundingly tantalizing photos of Pluto and it's main moon, Charon.

What strikes me the most about the color photos of Pluto is the color. They look like antique tintype prints. Even when I see the planet with the dark grey Charon immediately next to it, I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that this is the planet's actual color.

What's even more amazing to me is the fact that with the level of sunlight falling on these worlds and the speed at which New Horizons sped past that NASA was able to get any images whatsoever.

Science is cool.

And the fact that they can get closeups of the surface of this quality is nothing short of astounding—with even higher resolution images coming that will download over the coming months.

If Pluto weren't fascinating enough on it's own, Charton is revealing just as many surprises.

For example, how do you get a peak rising out of a circular depression? No one seems to know. What it looks like to me is that a space rock came in very, very slowly, and almost had a soft landing on an extremely plastic surface. Not traveling fast enough to form a traditional crater/ray structure, but fast enough to impact the surface and only slightly deform the surrounding terrain.

All I know is that after seeing these few images, it's obvious that humanity will have to return at some point for an even better look. I doubt it will happen in my lifetime, but it still fires the imagination—especially when you consider that we didn't get any sharp photos of Pluto's much more interesting face: