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Emily Lakdawalla • Oct 13, 2015

Charon in 3D

Last week, the pile of New Horizons LORRI camera raw image releases included nine frames from a high-resolution mosaic on Charon. You can put those together, if you like, to make a nice black-and-white global view, but it isn't dramatically different from the glorious color image of Charon taken by Ralph MVIC that they released last week. However, it is a little bit different. The LORRI view was taken a couple of hours before the MVIC one, and during those two hours, New Horizons' perspective on Charon changed. The perspective shift makes for a pretty dramatic 3D view of this moon's often surprising topography.

Charon in 3D
Charon in 3D The right-eye image is a mosaic of LORRI photos; the left-eye image is from Ralph MVIC.Image: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI / Alex Parker / Daniel Macháček

Pretty cool! Here's a quick look at all the close-approach Charon imagery now available on the raw image website.

Catalog of New Horizons' close-approach images of Charon as of October 13, 2015
Catalog of New Horizons' close-approach images of Charon as of October 13, 2015 New Horizons will take a year to return all its science data to Earth. This image compiles the data released for Charon from the period of 48 hours around closest approach to date. Text at the right side gives an idea of what kinds of data are missing in between the images already returned to Earth. Images are taken as part of specific science observations. If any data from an observation has reached Earth, the text for that observation is blue. The numbers for time, range, and resolution represent the actual metadata for the first image taken in any observation. Gray italic text represents observations that were commanded, but for which data have not yet appeared on the raw images website. This text comes from a table of planned observations given to Emily Lakdawalla by Leslie Young in July 2014. Times, ranges, and resolutions in that document are not precisely correct; they may be off by the actual values by up to ten minutes, thousands of kilometers, and tens of meters, respectively. There is no public information regarding how many images are supposed to be in all of these observations. Observations for which data are on this compilation may include more images not yet returned from the spacecraft. New Horizons LORRI images can be found here.Image: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI / Emily Lakdawalla

Other recent New Horizons image releases include this lovely color view of Pluto's entire backlit globe, which shows you that Pluto's sunrises and sunsets are tinted blue:

Pluto's blue skies
Pluto's blue skies Pluto’s haze layer shows its blue color in this picture taken by the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The high-altitude haze is thought to be similar in nature to that seen at Saturn’s moon Titan. The source of both hazes likely involves sunlight-initiated chemical reactions of nitrogen and methane, leading to relatively small, soot-like particles (called tholins) that grow as they settle toward the surface. This image was generated by software that combines information from blue, red and near-infrared images to replicate the color a human eye would perceive as closely as possible.Image: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI

And they finally downlinked a photo of Styx, which is surprisingly small. Pause for a moment and think about how surprising it is that astronomers were able to discover this tiny world, picking out the light of a moon only 5 kilometers in diameter orbiting so close to Pluto. Hubble is an amazing piece of engineering.

Styx from New Horizons
Styx from New Horizons Styx is Pluto's innermost small moon, and one of the last discovered (along with Kerberos). New Horizons took this photo from a distance of 631,000 kilometers, 12.5 hours out from Pluto closest approach. The image does not reveal any details but shows that Styx is very small indeed: in this image it appears about 5 by 7 kilometers in size.Image: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI

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