RMF 24: Charon sharp as a razor – Interia

NASA released the latest, colorful and most accurate picture to date of the moon of Pluto, Charon. The image shows the complex and probably quite brutal past. Picture is a composite of images recorded with your camcorder MVIC (Ralph / multispectral Visual Imaging Camera) in the field of blue and red light and infrared light. Charon is not as versatile as Pluto, the most impressive red, set around the North Pole area, informally named Mordor Macula.

Pluto’s moon Charon on a high resolution image taken July 14, 2015 of the year

/ NASA

NASA confirmed the discovery of water on Mars in the liquid state. This is a great breakthrough in studies involving the Red Planet and to confirm the thesis that Martian life could exist. Read more

Charon has a diameter of 1214 km, the smallest details that are visible on sent by the probe New Horizons image are less than 3 kilometers. Charon is the largest in relation to its planet (or dwarf planets) of the moon in the Solar System. Scientists expected that the area would be boring, at most cratered. Nothing could be further from the truth, Charon has a surface covered mountains, canyons, landslides, and finally areas of varying colors.
– We believe that the chances for an interesting landscape of the moon on the edge of the solar system are very small – admits Ross Beyer with the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. What we see when we could not more delight – he adds.
Photo northern hemisphere Charon, made just before the moment of closest approach the New Horizons spacecraft to Pluto has been sent to Earth on 21 September. It clearly belt canyons and cracks a bit north of the equator of the moon. The biggest system of canyons stretches about 1600 kilometers and probably dates back to – not visible in the picture – Charon hemisphere. This formation is four times longer than the Grand Canyon and in some places twice his deeper. This indicates that in the past the moon has been there for a gigantic upheavals.

– It looks as if the whole crust of Charon has a crack – says John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. If we take into account the size of the canyon relative to the size of Charon, we can compare it to the canyons of the Valles Marineris on Mars – notes.

NASA has published a “common” image of Charon and Pluto, enables a comparison of their size and color surfaces. This, of course submitting a photo that does not keep the distances between the two celestial bodies, proportion and color saturation strengthened slightly but in both cases preserved. Draws attention to the similarity of red color polar region of Charon and the equatorial belt Pluto.

Pluto Charon on “common” image from the camera MVIC

/ NASA

Grzegorz Jasinski