Charon tagged posts

Using New Horizons data from the Pluto-Charon flyby in 2015, a Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists have indirectly discovered a distinct and surprising lack of very small objects in the Kuiper Belt...

Map projection of Charon, the largest of Pluto’s five moons, annotated with its first set of official feature names. With a diameter of about 1,215 km, the France-sized moon is one of largest known objects in the Kuiper Belt, the region of icy, rocky bodies beyond Neptune. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

The International Astronomical Union (IAU), the internationally recognized authority for naming celestial bodies and their surface features, recently approved a dozen names proposed by NASA’s New Horizons team, which led the first reconnaissance of Pluto and its moons in 2015 with the New Horizons spacecraft...

Pluto, shown here in the front of this false-color image, has a bright ice-covered ‘heart.’ The left, roughly oval lobe is the basin provisionally named Sputnik Planitia. Sputnik Planitia appears directly opposite Pluto’s moon, Charon (back). Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

Heart’s location and Charon’s existence led to heart’s formation. Pluto’s “icy heart” is a bright, two-lobed feature on its surface that has attracted researchers ever since its discovery by the NASA New Horizons team in 2015. Of particular interest is the heart’s western lobe, informally named Sputnik Planitia, a deep basin containing 3 kinds of ices – frozen nitrogen, methane and CO — and appearing opposite Charon, Pluto’s tidally locked moon...

IMAGE1: The latest spectra from New Horizons Ralph instrument reveal abundance of methane ice, but with striking differences from place to place across the frozen surface of Pluto. “We just learned that in the north polar cap, methane ice is diluted in a thick, transparent slab of nitrogen ice resulting in strong absorption of infrared light,” …In one of the visually dark equatorial patches, the methane ice has shallower infrared absorptions indicative of a different texture. “The spectrum appears as if the ice is less diluted in N…or that it has a different texture in that area.”

IMAGE2: New close-up images of a region near Pluto’s equator reveal a giant surprise – a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet above the surface of the icy body...