NASA’s New Horizons robotic probe captured this image of the night side of Charon on July 17, 2015, nearly three days after closest approach to the Pluto system.
This New Horizons image shows the night side of Charon. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
At the time of this image, New Horizons was roughly 1.9 million miles (3.1 million km) from Pluto’s largest moon.
The image was taken by the sensitive Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on board the spacecraft.
“Only an imager on the far side of Pluto could catch such a view, with a bright, thin sliver of Charon near the lower left illuminated by the Sun,” said members of the New Horizons’ scientific team.
They are using this and similar images to map portions of Charon otherwise not visible during the flyby.
This includes Charon’s south pole, which entered polar night 26 years ago and will not see sunlight again until 2107.
Polar temperatures drop to near absolute zero (minus 459.67 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale) during this long winter.
New Horizons is currently 3.3 billion miles (5.31 billion km) from Earth and 144.1 million miles (231.9 million km) beyond Pluto.
The spacecraft is healthy and all systems are operating normally.
