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By Nadia Drake
Remember (click here) when we reported that Charon would probably turn out to be an astonishing world in its own right? Well, the newest image released by the New Horizons team suggests Pluto’s largest moon is absolutely that.
In the photo, shot from less than 5 million kilometers away, the 1,200-kilometer-wide sphere appears riven with enormous canyons — at least one of which is deeper and longer than the Grand Canyon, said planetary geologist Bill McKinnon
of the Washington University in St. Louis in a statement. In addition,
Charon’s surface is mottled with impact craters. That alone is not
surprising (in fact, craters were one of the team’s top predictions for
surface features on Charon), but the size and color are intriguing. One
of the crater bottoms appears darker than the surrounding surface;
whether this is because it’s made of different material or is simply
less reflective isn’t clear yet. And then there’s that mysteriously dark
region capping the moon’s pole....I have to say that the idea Mars could be a habitable planet is a bit an over calculation. It does not have the sunlight as Earth does and what exactly do people believe they are going to grow for food even if an Earth atmosphere could be established.
By the way such an environment requires gravity.
...One involves (click here) a grow-your-own approach to life support and nutrition. It turns out that if you grow 10,000 wheat plants, you can generate more than enough oxygen to breathe while removing the human waste gas of carbon dioxide. Better still, you have a partial source of nutrition. For a while, the Space Center had a team of four volunteers locked up in a hermetically sealed tube, subsisting pretty independently on this self-regenerating, hydroponically grown life-support system.
And that’s all great — until you factor in the possibility of crop failure....
The only valid reason to seek deep space is to plot a course to another planet in a different solar system with a sun that is not old and growing cold. I would think any residence on Mars would be temporary at best.
