NASA releases best photos yet of Pluto’s jumbo moon, Charon

The latest high-resolution images of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, have revealed a world that appears on the verge of splitting in two. Instead, Charon was found to have many distinct features, including landslides and mountains, canyons, and, obviously, a multi-colored surfaced. The system covers more than 1,000 miles and likely wraps right around the middle of Charon. It is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon and four times as long. Nasa explained that its appearance indicated a “titanic” geological upheaval in Charon’s past.

Indeed, sometime in the ancient past, the crust of Charon was split open.

This resurfacing could have been the work of cold volcanic activity, driven by an internal ocean of water that froze over in the distant past.

While Pluto has the iconic heart-shaped region stamped across its southern hemisphere, Charon has a decidedly different feature across its face: A huge, 1,000-mile long canyon.

The latest high-res photo was taken just before New Horizon’s closest approach to the Plutonian system back in mid-July.

“A zoomed-in mosaic across Charon show relatively smooth, crater-free plains, the surprisingly vast canyon system and moon-like cratered terrain, indicators of a violent past”. The spacecraft is “currently 3.1 billion miles (5 billion kilometers) from Earth, with all systems healthy and operating normally”, according to NASA.

In this extended colour image of Pluto taken by New Horizons, rounded and bizarrely textured mountains, informally named the Tartarus Dorsa, rise up along Pluto’s day-night terminator and show intricate but puzzling patterns of blue-gray ridges and reddish material in between.

Beyer is a researcher at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center who is now working on New Horizons’ imaging team.

Scientists aren’t sure what causes the pattern, but theories include the impact of plate tectonics rippling the surface, or frozen gasses that are released when surface temperatures increase.

“The big canyons look like they are formed by simple stretching of Charon’s crust until it broke – we’ve seen similar things in other places, including Earth”, New Horizons scientist John Spencer told Mashable via email.