Known as the first spacecraft to travel to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has recently transmitted the first high-definition and coloured images of Pluto's Charon, according to a report by The Christian Science Monitor (CS Monitor). Among the ex-planet's five moons, Charon is measured to be half as wide as Pluto (1,430 miles). NASA describes Charon's journey through the ultra detailed photographs - deducing it to have had "a surprisingly complex and violent history."
With a landscape boasting of mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations, etc, it was a stark contrast to the assumptions of New Horizon scientists about Pluto's moon - monotonous and crater-battered. Officially captured last July 14 and sent back to Earth on Sept. 21, the images reveal a belt of fractures and a canyon described to be four times the length of the Grand Canyon and double its depth.
"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," says 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," he expresses.
Deputy lead for GGI at the Southwest Research Institute, John Spencer, describes as per NASA that Charon's entire crust seems to be "split open" and furthermore compares it with the Valles Marineris canyon system discovered in Mars.
Vulcan Planum, the informal name for the plains discovered at the South of Charon's canyon were observed to feature fewer craters as compare to those found in the north of the moon leading the scientists to conclude that they are younger. "The smoothness of the plains, as well as their grooves and faint ridges, are clear signs of wide-scale resurfacing," NASA reports.
New Horizons team member from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Paul Schenk, theorizes "cryovolcanism" to what might be the reason for the smooth surface observed. He and the team hypothesizes that an "internal water ocean" may have frozen over and eventually led to Charon cracking open. The event then allowed for "water-based lavas" to reach the surface.
Explore Charon through a video documentation. Click here.
According to the space station, we can expect even more higher-resolution Charon images and composition over the next year. Mission Project Scientist Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, says, "I predict Charon's story will become even more amazing!"
Presently, the New Horizons spacecraft is currently 3.1 billion miles (5 billion kilometers) from Earth.
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.
For more details and high-definition images, you may visit www.nasa.gov/newhorizons and https://pluto.jhuapl.edu.