Fly Over Pluto's Moon In Spectacular New NASA Images

Thursday, October 1, 2015 - 13:50 in Astronomy & Space

Pluto has gotten a lot of love lately, both from scientists and the unscientific alike, thanks largely to the series of beautiful close-up images that NASA has published online following the unmanned New Horizon spacecraft's flyby of the dwarf planet earlier this year. But now Pluto's moon Charon is getting its own chance to shine in the spectacular new high-res images that NASA released today. Charon is Pluto's largest moon, but it is relatively tiny for the Solar System at just 754 miles in diameter (compared to Pluto's 1,473-mile diameter). One of five moons orbiting the dwarf planet (the others are Nyx, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx), Charon was long thought to be a relatively boring, crater-pocketed world, at least as far as its terrain goes. "It looks like the entire crust of Charon has been split open."But thanks to the New Horizons flyby, we now have access to...

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