Abstract
New Horizons images of Pluto’s companion Charon show a variety of terrains that display extensional tectonic features, with relief surprising for this relatively small world. These features suggest a global extensional areal strain of order 1% early in Charon’s history. Such extension is consistent with the presence of an ancient global ocean, now frozen.
Highlights
Charon, Pluto’s large companion, has a variety of terrains that exhibit tectonic features
We present observations of them here from New Horizons’ Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI, Cheng et al, 2008) and the Multi-spectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) on the Ralph instrument (Reuter et al, 2008)
This work analyzes these observations and measures tectonic strike, estimates elastic thickness, compares these features to those seen on Pluto, and concludes that Charon has undergone global extension
Summary
Pluto’s large companion, has a variety of terrains that exhibit tectonic features. The Pluto-facing hemisphere that New Horizons (Stern et al, 2015) observed at high resolution has two broad provinces: the relatively smooth plains of Vulcan Planum in the southern part of the encounter hemisphere (Spencer et al, 2016; Moore et al, 2016a), and the zone north of Vulcan Planum, which we describe here, and informally named Oz Terra This latter zone is characterized by grooves, graben, and scarps, which are signs of extensional tectonism (Fig. 1). North of the Vulcan Planum boundary with Oz Terra, the terrain is exceptionally rugged (Fig. 2) and contains a network of fault-bounded troughs and scarps in the equatorial to middle latitudes (Moore et al, 2016a) This transitions northward and over the pole to the visible limb into an irregular zone where the fault traces are neither so parallel nor so obvious, but which contains irregular depressions and other large relief variations (Fig. 3). The lower-resolution views of the non-encounter hemisphere (Fig. 10) are suggestive of other potential large ridges and troughs, indicating that the tectonic expressions we see so well on the encounter hemisphere likely extend around Charon
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