Charon Pluto’s Moon
The US Space agency mission is in the process of downlinking all the data it gathered during its historic flyby of Pluto on 14th July 2015. Pluto’s major Moon Charon’s pictures from the New Horizon mission.
The probe has already travelled 100 million miles beyond the dwarf planet since the flyby, putting it five billion miles from Earth. But the quality of the data coming back is remarkable.
Researchers see some fascinating and diverse surface features like mountains, crater, crumpled northern highlands and smooth rolling southern lowlands..
There is also a vast system of fractures and canyons stretching around Charon’s middle and some of the features is much like the vast Valles Marineris Canyon system on Mars. It seems the entire crust of Charon has been split open according to John Spencer a senior scientist on the mission from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder. Colorado.
Researchers have done a count of craters including the smooth southern plains, which have been dubbed Vulcan Planum and its wide-scale resurfacing.
According to Nasa statement from Paul Schenk of Lunar and Planetary institute in Houston , “we are looking into the idea that a kind of cold volcanic activity, called cryovolcanism may been responsible and also the possibility of internal water ocean could have frozen long ago, resulting volume change could have led to Charon cracking open allowing water-based lavas to reach the surface at that time.”