Oh, yeah… there are good pics of Charon alright! I was at the Boston Museum of Science, and the Planetarium had a 45 minute session, 30 devoted to Pluto, and the last 15 or so showed photos from New Horizons.
I was blown away just seeing what they did to get New Horizons to Pluto in 9 years. A direct route would have taken 12, but they used Jupiter's momentum to speed up the trip. Jupiter's over a billion miles away and Pluto's 3 billion. The precision these scientists are working with…! I mean, you really can't mess up that countdown or you just shot extremely expensive equipment into space for nothing.
Both Pluto and Charon are active worlds. Charon has a craterless section (proving that the surface is changing), and Pluto has no craters. There's a mountainous section, plains with these odd dark bumps—no one knows what they are. Charon has a canyon deep as the Grand Canyon but covering a larger area (by 3 or 4 times, I think). I remember some moons being tiny, like one egg-shaped moon was 30 miles at its largest diameter; its smallest diameter only 19 miles. Another may have had a diameter of 16 miles.
We voted whether or not Pluto is a planet. It was close, but my vote in favor put me on the losing side. (It's okay, Massachusetts; I'm used to it.) But now my reason is more informed. I always thought of a planet as a celestial body that orbits the sun. I can see how this definition doesn't work—or ALL of the asteroids would be planets too. If Pluto counts, we have hundreds of dwarf planets in the Kupier belt that would also count. But they are called "dwarf planets."
Anyway, no matter Pluto's classification, it was cool to see its pictures only a few days after NASA got to see them, and the added bonus was seeing them on a screen larger than a movie theater screen!
I was blown away just seeing what they did to get New Horizons to Pluto in 9 years. A direct route would have taken 12, but they used Jupiter's momentum to speed up the trip. Jupiter's over a billion miles away and Pluto's 3 billion. The precision these scientists are working with…! I mean, you really can't mess up that countdown or you just shot extremely expensive equipment into space for nothing.
Both Pluto and Charon are active worlds. Charon has a craterless section (proving that the surface is changing), and Pluto has no craters. There's a mountainous section, plains with these odd dark bumps—no one knows what they are. Charon has a canyon deep as the Grand Canyon but covering a larger area (by 3 or 4 times, I think). I remember some moons being tiny, like one egg-shaped moon was 30 miles at its largest diameter; its smallest diameter only 19 miles. Another may have had a diameter of 16 miles.
We voted whether or not Pluto is a planet. It was close, but my vote in favor put me on the losing side. (It's okay, Massachusetts; I'm used to it.) But now my reason is more informed. I always thought of a planet as a celestial body that orbits the sun. I can see how this definition doesn't work—or ALL of the asteroids would be planets too. If Pluto counts, we have hundreds of dwarf planets in the Kupier belt that would also count. But they are called "dwarf planets."
Anyway, no matter Pluto's classification, it was cool to see its pictures only a few days after NASA got to see them, and the added bonus was seeing them on a screen larger than a movie theater screen!