Pluto’s moon Charon reveals its history

NASA received another set of Charon images from New Horizons that reveal a lot about the largest moon of Pluto, Charon. Instead, they have discovered a giant canyon in addition to mountains, landslides, and variations in surface colour that depict a far more diverse world than our moon.

Finally, check out this remarkable flyover video of Charon, starting with the darker Mordor region near Charon’s red-tinted north pole, then moving south to a vast chasm, descending from 1,100 miles to just 40 miles above the surface to zip through the canyon system.

Never-seen-before images of Pluto’s moon Charon have revealed a huge valley that’s four times as long as the Grand Canyon and twice as deep.

The images were taken by the spacecraft’s Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC).

New Horizons has put Pluto in its rear-view mirror, but NASA still has many gigabytes of data to download from the probe.

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.

With every new image comes new understanding of the Pluto system. This’ll really take time to figure out; maybe it’s a few combination of internal tectonic forces and ice sublimation driven by Pluto’s faint sunlight’.

“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. Researchers believe that a long, long time ago, an ocean existed beneath the surface of Charon.

Charon’s cratered uplands at the left are broken by series of canyons, and replaced at the right by the rolling plains of Vulcan Planum.

At first glance, it could be that come process, such as cryovolcansim, is actively resurfacing the sourthen plains, making the landscpe appear younger.

As more and more pictures are received, we may learn still more about the unusual geological past of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon.

Cryovolcanism, a kind of cold volcanic activity, was determined to be a possible explanation for the smoothness of Charon’s surface. The New Horizons team said in a statement: “These faults and canyons indicate a titanic geological upheaval in Charon’s past”. The deep canyon and one of the tallest mountains are featured in the animation in new detail.

New Horizons is now 5bn kilometres from Earth, and travelling further away.