Charon Makes Its Debut
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft provides the first up-close view of Pluto’s largest moon.
Charon is the largest of Pluto’s five moons. Once thought to be a uniform ball of ice, images taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its July 2015 flyby of the Pluto system reveal a varied world with surprising features. Dark compounds, believed to be frozen wisps of atmosphere from Pluto, blanket Charon’s northern pole. Running across Charon’s surface are cracks stretching at least 1,000 miles, including a chasm deeper than the Grand Canyon. What’s more, the moon may not even be a moon. Charon and Pluto tango around a center of mass that lies in space between them, like two ends of a lopsided dumbbell. The irregular orbits have some scientists calling the bodies a double planet. Explore the video and images to learn more.
This animation shows the orbit of Charon and Pluto. They complete one orbit around a point in space that lies between them every 6.4 Earth days.
Charon’s diverse craters and cracks stand out in this enhanced color image taken by New Horizons.
This image, captured near the spacecraft’s closest approach, reveals craters and canyons as small as a half-mile wide.
Image of Charon and Earth’s moon shown to scale. Charon is about one-third the diameter of Earth’s moon.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Video and Charon images courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Charon and Earth's moon image courtesy of New Horizons/Southwest Research Institute/Carly Howett
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Scientists
- Carly Howett (New Horizons/Southwest Research Institute)
- Mark Sykes (Planetary Science Institute)
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Writer
- Natalie Jacewicz (USRA)
Release date
This page was originally published on Tuesday, February 23, 2016.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:48 PM EDT.