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Mighty CHASMS, craters FOUND ON MOON of Pluto

'Featureless ball of ice'? Au contraire, says space probe boffins

The New Horizons mission has turned its attention to Charon, moon of mysterious dwarf ice-world Pluto, and has found it to be a lot more interesting than had been thought.

The probe snapped the image at the top of this story (here for readers on mobile devices) on Saturday 11 July and NASA said it was excited because it apparently revealed the moon is not a lifeless hunk of rock.

William McKinnon, deputy lead scientist with New Horizon’s geology and geophysics investigation team, explained that the shot showed “... the first clear evidence of faulting and surface disruption on Charon.”

He added: "New Horizons has transformed our view of this distant moon from a nearly featureless ball of ice to a world displaying all kinds of geologic activity.”

NASA's spacecraft has spotted a crater thought to be 96 kilometres across, which is understood to have been caused by a collision with something in the last billion years or so.

The US space agency came to that conclusion as the rays of material emanating from the crater look quite bright. The crater's floor, however, is dark.

McKinnon hypothesises that the hole's bottom contains darker material than the reflective and likely-icy stuff near the surface. Or perhaps “the ice in the crater floor is the same material as its surroundings but has a larger ice grain size, which reflects less sunlight. In this scenario, the impactor that gouged the crater melted the ice in the crater floor, which then refroze into larger grains.”

We'll learn more about Charon and Pluto later this week, after New Horizons makes its closest approach to the dwarf planet on Tuesday. ®

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