NASA unveiled high-resolution images of Charon, the largest of Pluto's moons, and were also able to detail a violent history.
Unveiled in a news release Thursday, Charon has a gigantic canyon that stretches more than 1,000 miles, more than four times as long as the Grand Canyon. The chasm is also much deeper at certain points as well.
"We thought the probability of seeing such interesting features on this satellite of a world at the far edge of our solar system was low, but I couldn't be more delighted with what we see," Ross Beyer, an affiliate of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team from the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., said in the release.
The new images come from the New Horizons spacecraft's flyby of Pluto and shows the moon's hemisphere that faces the distant dwarf planet.
"The team is discussing the possibility that an internal water ocean could have frozen long ago, and the resulting volume change could have led to Charon cracking open, allowing water-based lavas to reach the surface at that time," Paul Schenk, a New Horizons team member from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, said in the release.
"It looks like the entire crust of Charon has been split open," John Spencer, deputy lead for GGI at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in the release. "With respect to its size relative to Charon, this feature is much like the vast Valles Marineris canyon system on Mars."
