A cold and distant place, imaged for the first time from a distance seemingly within reach.
"Chasms, craters, and a dark north polar region are revealed," writes NASA, which reports that the New Horizons probe recorded the imaging data on July 11, 2015.
The most prominent crater, which lies near the south pole of Charon in an image taken July 11 and radioed to Earth today, is about 60 miles (96.5 kilometers) across. The brightness of the rays of material blasted out of the crater suggest it formed relatively recently in geologic terms, during a collision with a small Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) some time in the last billion years.
The darkness of the crater's floor is especially intriguing, says McKinnon. One explanation is that the crater has exposed a different type of icy material than the more reflective ices that lie on the surface. Another possibility is that 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.
A mysterious dark region near Charon's north pole stretches for 200 miles. More detailed images that New Horizons will take around the time of closest approach to the moon on July 14 may provide hints about the dark region's origin.
Humans will walk there one day. They'll probably be angry about it, too. Meanwhile, there's only a million miles to go before we reach Pluto itself.
