Explanation:
What if you could fly over Pluto's moon Charon -- what might you see?
The New Horizons spacecraft did just this in 2015 July as it
zipped past Pluto and Charon with cameras blazing.
The images recorded allowed for a digital reconstruction of much of
Charon's surface,
further enabling the creation of fictitious flights over Charon created from this
data.
One such fanciful, minute-long, time-lapse video is
shown here with vertical
heights and colors of surface features digitally enhanced.
Your journey begins over a wide chasm that divides different types of
Charon's landscapes,
a chasm that might have formed when
Charon
froze through.
You soon turn north and fly over a colorful depression dubbed
Mordor that,
one hypothesis holds, is an
unusual remnant from an ancient impact.
Your
voyage continues over an
alien landscape
rich with never-before-seen craters, mountains, and crevices.
The robotic
New Horizons spacecraft has now been targeted at
Kuiper Belt object
2014 MU 69,
which it should zoom past on New Year's Day 2019.
