This is the best image we've ever seen of Pluto's largest moon - and it has stunned scientists
After hours of tense waiting, NASA finally released the first images its New Horizons spacecraft took during its historic flyby of Pluto and its moons.
That full collection of images will trickle in over the next year or so, but NASA's first release included some unprecedented views of Pluto's largest moon Charon (pronounced Shar-on, according to its discoverer):
NASA-JHUAPL-SwRIRemarkable new details of Pluto's largest moon Charon are revealed in this image from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), taken late on July 13, 2015 from a distance of 289,000 miles (466,000 kilometers)."Charon just blew our socks off," Cathy Olkin, New Horizons deputy project scientist, said during a NASA press conference Wednesday. "The team has just been abuzz, 'look at this, look at that, that's amazing!'"
We've known about Charon since the 1970s - well before the New Horizons mission. But the best images we had of it were fuzzy blobs, like the one below, which the Hubble space telescope captured in 1998. Charon is the top right object:
"Charon has been active [recently], and there are mountains in the Kuiper belt," Stern said during the press conference.
The canyon in the top right corner of Charon is four to six miles deep, Olkin said, and there are cliffs that extend about 600 miles across.
Researchers are also learning a lot more about Charon's mysteriously dark-colored north pole that they have nicknamed "Mordor."