Posted on 10/03/2015 7:42:02 PM PDT by ETL
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has sent incredible images of Pluto’s largest moon Charon back to Earth.
The latest images reveal the moon’s complex and violent history, according to NASA. “Many New Horizons scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; instead, they’re finding a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations and more,” explained the space agency, in a statement.
The high-resolution images, which were taken on July 14 and transmitted to Earth on Sept. 21, reveal a belt of fractures and canyons just north of the moon’s equator. Four times as long as the Grand Canyon, and twice as deep in places, the faults and canyons indicate a titanic geological upheaval in Charon’s past, according to NASA.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Pluto moon Charon ping
Amazing.
“Charon, also called (134340) Pluto I,[1] is the largest of the five known moons of the dwarf planet Pluto. It was discovered in 1978 at the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., using photographic plates taken at the United States Naval Observatory Flagstaff Station (NOFS). It is a very large moon in comparison to its parent body, Pluto. Its gravitational influence is such that the barycenter of the Pluto–Charon system lies outside Pluto.
New Horizons flew through the Pluto–Charon system on 14 July 2015, approaching to within 27,000 km (17,000 mi) of Charon.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_%28moon%29
Alex Trebek keeps saying there are now only 8 planets.
Who gets to decide? I think Pluto clearly is a planet.
It does not look quite round. Or, as they say in the tire business “out of round”.
“Charon and Pluto orbit each other every 6.387 days. The two objects are gravitationally locked to one another, so each keeps the same face towards the other. This is a case of mutual tidal locking, as compared to that of the Earth and the Moon, where the Moon always shows the same face to Earth, but not vice versa. The average distance between Charon and Pluto is 19,570 kilometres (12,160 mi).
The discovery of Charon allowed astronomers to accurately calculate the mass of the Plutonian system, and mutual occultations revealed their sizes. However, neither indicated the two bodies’ individual masses, which could only be estimated, until the discovery of Pluto’s outer moons in late 2005. Details in the orbits of the outer moons reveal that Charon has approximately 11.65% of the mass of Pluto.[3] This shows it to have a density of 1.65 ± 0.06 g/cm3, suggesting a composition of 55 ± 5% rock to 45% ice, whereas Pluto is somewhat denser and about 70% rock.
Simulation work published in 2005 by Robin Canup suggested that Charon could have been formed by a collision around 4.5 billion years ago, much like Earth and the Moon. In this model, a large Kuiper belt object struck Pluto at high velocity, destroying itself and blasting off much of Pluto’s outer mantle, and Charon coalesced from the debris.[21]
However, such an impact should result in an icier Charon and rockier Pluto than scientists have found. It is now thought that Pluto and Charon may have been two bodies that collided before going into orbit about each other. The collision would have been violent enough to boil off volatile ices like methane (CH4) but not violent enough to have destroyed either body.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_%28moon%29
Sort of egg shaped.
That’s a spectacular photo. To this astronomy duffer, its passing resemblance to our own moon is captivating.
Seems like half of it was peeled off or some type of materiel flow just stopped. Fascinating.
Yeah, looks kinda beat up. Less spheroid, more old decorative concrete.
I wonder if Pluto calls his little moon, ‘My Charona’?... (Sorry, as he slinks off to another thread).
It all depends on what the definition or meaning of 'planet' is.
Astronomers first called it a planet. And then, before it can complete a victory lap, they take the title away.
They should at least call it a brevet-planet!
And considering that Pluto's orbit varies so much from the ecliptic of the solar system, I wonder if its moons were acquired before or after being captured by the gravity of the sun.
Not massive enough to have a strong enough gravitational field to pull it into a more spherical shape.
You sure that’s not a still image from Obama’s last colonoscopy?
Thanks ETL, extra to APoD.
Is that Uranus? Lol.
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