NASA flyby spies Pluto moon's mountainous moat
Pluto's big moon Charon keeps getting more and more interesting.
A newly released Charon photo, which was taken by NASA's New Horizons probe during its聽聽Tuesday (July 14), reveals a mountain rising out of a big hole on the 750-mile-wide (1,200 kilometers) moon's surface.
The feature, which is visible at the bottom left-hand corner of the inset, is "a large mountain sitting in a moat," Jeff Moore, of NASA鈥檚 Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said in a statement. []
"This is a feature that has geologists stunned and stumped," added Moore, who leads New Horizons' geology, geophysics and imaging team.
The new image covers an area about 200 miles long (320 km) from top to bottom, NASA officials explained聽. New Horizons captured the photo on Tuesday morning from a distance of 49,000 miles (79,000 km).
About 80 minutes later, the spacecraft reached its closest Pluto approach, zooming to within just 7,800 miles (12,500 km) of the dwarf planet's frigid surface. So there will be even better images of Charon 鈥� and of Pluto and its other four moons 鈥斅燾oming down shortly.
Indeed, NASA will hold a news conference tomorrow (July 17) at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) to unveil and discuss the latest photos and discoveries from New Horizons. You can聽, courtesy of NASA TV.
The $723 million New Horizons mission launched in January 2006 to lift the veil on the Pluto system. The spacecraft gathered reams of data using seven different science instruments during its highly anticipated flyby. It will take up to 16 months for New Horizons to beam all of these observations back to its handlers on Earth.
But the few up-close images analyzed and released so far have revealed Pluto and Charon to be complex and surprising worlds that have been geologically active in the recent past. New Horizons spied 11,000-foot-high (3,500 meters)聽, for example, as well as Charon canyons up to 6 miles (10 km) deep.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter聽听补苍诲听.聽Follow us聽,听听辞谤听. Originally published on聽.
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