We knew that Charon had none of that, and instead it was covered in water ice like a typical airless satellite of Uranus or Neptune or most of the satellites of Saturn, for example.” A view of Charon from New Horizons taken on July 8. We knew that Pluto had an atmosphere and volatile ices like nitrogen and carbon monoxide on the surface, that can move from place to place. “Charon is about half as reflective as Pluto. “We knew that they had different reflectivities,” Stern said. “In the early 1990s, we used to talk a lot about something called the Pluto-Charon dichotomy - that they are such different objects. “As early as the early 1990s we knew that Pluto and Charon were very different,” Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator, told reporters earlier this week. “Its personality is beginning to really reveal itself.”īefore New Horizons, researchers knew Pluto and Charon were very different. “Charon is now emerging as its own world,” said John Spencer, a New Horizons scientist from the Southwest Research Institute. Image analysts added color to the image using data gathered by the spacecraft’s Ralph instrument earlier in the approach to Pluto. The image released Thursday was captured in black-and-white late Wednesday by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI, telescopic camera. Material from Pluto and the other object eventually coalesced to create Charon, according to the leading theory. Scientists believe Charon, the largest of Pluto’s five known moons, formed in an ancient collision between Pluto and another large body. Living up to promises that the view from New Horizons will only get better, the Pluto-bound spacecraft has again bested itself with a dazzling color view of Pluto and Charon released Thursday. Color data from New Horizons’ Ralph instrument was added to colorize the image. New Horizons was about 3.7 million miles (6 million kilometers) from Pluto and Charon when it snapped this portrait late on July 8, 2015.

Colorize collision center