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On July 14, 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made its historic flight through the Pluto system. This detailed, high-quality global mosaic of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, was assembled from nearly all of the highest-resolution images obtained by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) on New Horizons.

The mosaic is the most detailed and comprehensive global view yet of Charon’s surface using New Horizons data. It includes topography data of the hemisphere visible to New Horizons during the spacecraft’s closest approach. The topography is derived from digital stereo-image mapping tools that measure the parallax – or the difference in the apparent relative positions – of features on the surface obtained at different viewing angles during the encounter. Scientists use these parallax displacements of high and low terrain to estimate landform heights.

The global mosaic has been overlain with transparent, colorized topography data wherever on the surface stereo data is available. Terrain south of about 30°S was in darkness leading up to and during the flyby, so is shown in black. All feature names on Pluto and Charon are informal.

The global mosaic has been overlain with transparent, colorized topography data wherever on their surfaces stereo data is available. Standing out on Charon is the Caleuche Chasma (“C”) in the far north, an enormous trough at least 350 kilometers (nearly 220 miles) long, and reaching 14 kilometers (8.5 miles) deep –more than seven times as deep as the Grand Canyon.

Mosaics and topography maps are also available in equirectangular projection at an equatorial pixel scale of 300 meters (985 feet) per pixel, and in uncompressed jpeg format as well as in cube format; the latter can be read using the USGS ISIS Planetary Image Processing Software.

All maps were producing using radii of 1188.3 kilometers/738.3 miles for Pluto and 606 kilometers/376.6 miles for Charon. The JPEG of the grayscale Digital Elevation Maps (DEMs) for Charon display an elevation scale stretch of -14 (black) to +6 (white).

• Charon_Basemap.jpg (15MB)


• Charon_Basemap_DEM.jpg (21MB)


• Charon_DEM.cub (320MB)


• Charon_DEM.jpg (6MB)

All of these map products will be delivered to NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS) in fall 2017.

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