NASA Releases First Clear Photos Of Pluto With Its Largest Moon
(CBS SF) -- As NASA's unmanned New Horizons spacecraft closes in on a nine-year journey to Pluto, the first clear picture of the icy dwarf planet with its largest moon has made it back to earth.
The new high-contrast image taken July 8 reveals the brighter areas on the moon Charon might be impact craters, which would be good news for members of the mission's Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team (GGI).
"If we see impact craters on Charon, it will help us see what's hidden beneath the surface," said GGI leader Jeff Moore of NASA's Ames Research Center. "Large craters can excavate material from several miles down and reveal the composition of the interior."
Pluto has a significant atmosphere that gives it the reddish color seen in the photo below. Meanwhile, Charon's uniform gray terrain is the result of ices like frozen nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide, which have already been detected on the moon's surface.
Like other planet and moon relationships in our solar system, scientists believe Pluto and Charon were shaped by a cosmic collision billions of years ago.
"These two objects have been together for billions of years, in the same orbit, but they are totally different," said Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado.
New Horizons will fly past Pluto at 30,800 miles per hour on July 14 as a suite of science instruments busily gather data. The mission will complete its initial three-billion-mile journey of the solar system.