Pluto’s largest moon tagged posts

Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, gets its 1st official feature names

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

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...

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