Pluto’s moon has canyon twice as deep as Grand Canyon

Images taken by New Horizons on July 14 – the day of the closest flyby – reveal a stunning surface geology featuring mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations and more.

The findings have already surprised scientists who expected expected Charon to show nothing more than a barren, cratered landscape.

The latest pictures released Thursday illustrate Charon as a complex world covered in ridges, canyons, mountains and different colors, with a noticeable change in terrain between the moon’s northern and southern hemispheres. Scientists believe that the canyon system may very well stretch across Charon’s far side.

We have a Grand Canyon of ourselves on Earth, but estimations say Charon’s is roughly four times longer than this one, and twice as deep in a couple of places.

‘But I couldn’t be more delighted with what we see’.

The photographs have been taken by the New Horizons spacecraft throughout its flyby of Pluto in July and transmitted to Earth 1½ weeks in the past. The scene covers Charon’s width of 754 miles (1,214 kilometers) and resolves details as small as 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers).

‘With respect to its size relative to Charon, this feature is much like the vast Valles Marineris canyon system on Mars’.

In this scenario, a subsurface water ocean within Charon would have frozen sometime in the world’s past, causing the moon’s crust to crack, spewing water out to the surface, according to NASA.

‘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.

More startling, the images show that the planes to the south of the canyons are noticeably smoother and younger, which hints at a particularly violent resurfacing event that encapsulated almost half the moon.

A New Horizons heads into the Kuiper Belt, toward a new destination a billion miles beyond Pluto, it continues to send images and data that have astonished the world and pushed back the frontiers of science. But that’s exactly what NASA’s New Horizons probe found spinning around everyone’s favorite once-upon-a-planet.

If or when future space explorers stand on either body, the companion micro planet will remain forever motionless in the same part of the sky, but exhibiting similar phases to our moon as the two bodies rotate in relation to the position of the distant Sunday.

New Horizons is now five billion kilometres away from Earth.