NASA Latest News: New Color Image of Pluto's Moon Charon Shows Surprising Details
NASA has released a new color image of Pluto's jumbo moon named Charon, which provides fresh details about the history of the tiny planet's system.
Charon, the largest moon of Pluto, is the subject of the new enhanced-color and high-resolution photos released by NASA recently. The photo serves as an additional source of information about Charon's surface and is useful in the study about the mysterious dwarf planet, according to The Verge.
NASA released the enhanced-color image of Charon on Thursday. The photo was snapped on July 14 just before the New Horizons team's Pluto flyby, CNET reports.
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"Many New Horizons scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world," CNET quotes NASA's report. "Instead, they're finding a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations, and more."
The jumbo moon measures half of Pluto's diameter and is in a "tidal lock" with the tiny planet. Just like in the Earth's relationship to its own moon, Charon always has just one side facing Pluto. But unlike the Earth's moon, Charon is not a dead body of rock. It contains large canyons, mountains, and a colorful surface that suggest that there are living organisms in it.
Charon's red north pole (called Mordor Macula) is believed to have attracted organic hydrocarbons from Pluto, the New Horizons team says.
The newly released color photos also show that Charon's midsection contains massive scarring that is actually a system of canyons over 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) in length. The team also thinks the canyons continue on to the other side of Charon. NASA says this kind of geological formation only happens in an active world, the report relays.
Since the New Horizons team started approaching Pluto this summer, the members have been confronted with surprising information about the dwarf planet. Despite its distance from the sun, it has a visible atmosphere, large mountains, ice flows, and methane.
The New Horizons team expects more surprises to come as they are still not done gathering data about Pluto and its sytem, including its jumbo moon Charon.
