
Charon at 40: Four Decades of Discovery on Pluto’s Largest Moon - sohkamyung
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/charon-at-40-four-decades-of-discovery-on-pluto-s-largest-moon
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kieckerjan
Love the pic of Jim Christy in his study btw. I can never resist deciphering
the contents of someone's book case. The heavily bookmarked Penrose seems to
be one of his favorites. :)

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saagarjha
Wait, we didn't know Charon existed until _1978_?!

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dogma1138
Why is it so surprising? We didn’t had the ability to image pluto well until
then heck the best image we had until new horizons was a few pixels.

Pluto is tiny Charon is even smaller at those distances you can’t get any
clear images of such small objects.

Charon’s orbit is also technically not around Pluto as it’s slightly over half
it’s mass they both Orbit each other which made it much harder to detect.

And as far as Pluto goes afaik we don’t have its orbit fully mapped yet
either.

We were kinda lucky in that 1979-1999 was the period where Pluto’s orbit
passes inside of Neptune’s orbit which meant that we actually could image it
at resolutions slightly better than a single speck.

