Charon, Pluto's Largest Moon, Shows Colorful, Violent History (PHOTOS)
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has revealed some surprising new information about Pluto's largest moon, Charon. Recently received images show that Charon's surface is a landscape littered with mountains, canyons, landslides, and surface-color variations, according to NASA.
Charon, which is the largest satellite in relation to its planet in the solar system (its half the size of Pluto), was expected to be merely a "crater-battered" world, full of repetitive markings and, frankly, a somewhat boring landscape.
"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," Ross Beyer, an affiliate of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team from the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center, said. "But I couldn't be more delighted with what we see."
Also discovered by the New Horizons team were some hints at the age of some of Charon's canyons. The Vulcan Planum, a canyon located in the southern plains of the moon, appeared to have significantly fewer large craters than its northern companions, indicating that it is a much younger canyon. "The smoothness of the plains, as well as their grooves and faint ridges, are clear signs of wide-scale resurfacing," according to NASA.
Cryovolcanism, a kind of cold volcanic activity, was determined to be a possible explanation for the smoothness of Charon's surface.
"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," Paul Schenk, a New Horizons team member from the Lunar and Planetary Institute, said.
New Horizons will continue to send additional images and data over the next year. The spacecraft is "currently 3.1 billion miles (5 billion kilometers) from Earth, with all systems healthy and operating normally," according to NASA.
NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed out of Marshall Space Flight Center, is currently handling the New Horizons mission.
A video flyover of Charon can be "taken" on NASA's YouTube channel, here.
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