Charon Has an Outie in New Horizon's Latest Closeup

[Omaha Steve]

Last edited Thu Jul 16, 2015, 10:51 PM - Edit history (1)

Source: Wired

WELL HEL-LO, CHARON. NASA just released the latest photo of Pluto’s largest moon in stunning new detail, and this one’s got a closeup of an unusual beauty mark. To us, it strongly resembles an outie bellybutton. But if you’re not quite seeing it, you could also say it looks like “a large mountain sitting in a moat,” as New Horizons scientist Jeff Moore describes it. And his team has no idea what it is.

The closeup, shown above next to an earlier capture of Charon in its entirety, covers about 240 miles from top to bottom, and boasts some handsome craters as well. New Horizons took this image on Tuesday morning about an hour and a half before its historic closest approach to Pluto—about 49,000 miles away from Charon—and compressed it so the probe could send it more quickly back to Earth. So get ready for even better shots of Charon; the spacecraft is in the process of sending the real-deal, high-resolution images.







Read more: http://www.wired.com/2015/07/charon-outie-new-horizons-latest-closeup/

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Repleaced original Faux News story

[Octafish]

1. At the top of the close-up...

...it looks like a giant splinter hit Charon.

[alfredo]

4. Looks like there were some low angle impacts where the rocks formed tracks.

You can see them on our moon.

[SCVDem]

2. I love this sciency stuff!

The detail is amazing and I am blown away!

This is HUGE!

[longship]

3. And these are not likely the full resolution versions.

The New Horizons team is grabbing compressed pics now and will get the raw pics later. It will take all of 16 months to get all the data from the flyby. Such are the vagaries of data transfers when one has a 10 watt transmitter at a distance of 3 billion miles.

R&K

Thanks OS.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

5. This was launched back in 2003....

There were still people on Earthlink.

[longship]

11. Hell, there were probably people still on Compuserv.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

14. Probably. Windows XP was about 2 years old....

Dual core processors were "cutting edge".

[Psephos]

15. actually, 19 January 2006 n/t

[Spitfire of ATJ]

16. Okay,...that's a LITTLE better....

....there were cats...

[Psephos]

19. lol n/t

[47of74]

6. Here's a more agreeable link from Wired

For those of you who don't wanna make ones computer dirty by visiting Faux News

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/charon-outie-new-horizons-latest-closeup/

[Omaha Steve]

8. Happy camper now?

[47of74]

10. Thank you.

Wasn't expecting you to do all that, but thank you much for going back and replacing the Faux story with the Wired article.

[airplaneman]

7. Did you have to use Fox News

How about NASA website

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html


-Airplane

[Peace Patriot]

9. Next NASA press conference: tomorrow (Fri., 7/17/15) 10 am Pacific time,

1:00 pm ET.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

Should be mindblowing (way beyond previous mindblowings)!

[roamer65]

12. Notice the craters on Charon, yet they are absent on Pluto.

Pluto has some sort of techtonics going on, IMO very indicative of a PLANET.

Pluto is a PLANET.

[longship]

18. King of the Kuiper Belt Objects, or the dwarf planets.

Take your pick.

[2banon]

21. The heart shaped image on Pluto is interesting.

curious as to what that indicates.

[FiveGoodMen]

22. Pluto will be relieved to hear that it's a planet.

It's been in a terrible mood since the demotion.

[Codeine]

23. Tectonic activity is the new rubric?

I don't get the desire for some to insist that the people who know this stuff made an incorrect decision.

[47of74]

13. I'm probably being foolish and naive

But I really hope this comes to pass. (Even if the equivalent real world ships look nothing like this).

[longship]

17. Here's Emily Lakdawalla's (from the Planetary Society) explanation.

She explains the picture and what it means, with examples.

Latest pic from Charon; oddly familiar

The first thing that I notice when I examine this image is compression artifacts: a blocky texture to the otherwise smooth-looking areas. That is a result of the massive amount of compression they had to do to the images in order to squeeze them in to the short downlink time available right after the flyby. The original, high-quality data remains onboard the spacecraft and will be returned eventually, either this fall or sometime next year.

Look past the compression artifacts, and I see four major features in this photo:

* well-preserved impact craters (I don't see ejecta blankets, but there are distinct crater rims)
* very smooth terrain, except for those impact craters, and
* linear fissures in the smooth terrain, of unknown origin, at least one of which either cuts or is cut by a crater (the superposition relationship is unclear due to compression artifacts)
* that "mountain in a moat" at the top left

The geometry of this image is actually very similar to the geometry of the detail image of Pluto that they released yesterday. It is at the terminator (so the differences in brightness are shape-from-shading, not so much albedo) and it's from a pretty similar distance (77 or 79,000 kilometers), so the scale is the same. But what different landscapes! The mission really did get two completely distinct icy worlds for the price of one with this flyby.

Anyway, back to interpretation of the Charon image. I honestly don't know what to make of the "mountain in a moat" -- I'm with Jeff Moore, who's quoted in the related image release as saying "This is a feature that has geologists stunned and stumped." So I'm going to ignore that for now and focus on the fissures. I stared at the picture for a long time, trying to decide which icy moon they reminded me of, and I was drawing a blank. I realized I was thinking about the wrong worlds, and Andy Rivkin confirmed it on Twitter: they remind me of rilles in the lunar maria. A helpful Twitter follower suggested Rima Hyginus as a good analog, and it's not bad! Here's a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photo of Rima Hyginus, a set of graben (extensional faults). It could be that we're looking at very similar landscapes: a flood of highly fluid lava solidified and then cooled, and as it cooled it shrank and fractured, forming graben. Except that on the moon, the lava was liquid rock; on Charon, it would have been liquid water.

much more at link

Lakdawalla is great! BTW.

[hunter]

20. Once you train yourself to see image compression artifacts, for work, whatever...

... you can't stop seeing them. The ability becomes part of your image processing circuitry and can't be ignored.

I try not to let compression artifacts make me crazier than I already am; they are yet another one of those facts of modern life that irritate me, like the flicker of older fluorescent lights with magnetic ballasts. .

Nevertheless, these photos are wonderful!