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Pluto's Texas-size moon Charon is coming into sharper focus as NASA's New Horizons probe closes in for a dramatic flyby Tuesday, revealing apparent impact craters, huge chasms longer and deeper than the Grand Canyon and an unusual dark polar cap. The latest photo, released late Sunday, came just a few hours before New Horizons passed within one miles of Pluto, racing at nearly , mph toward a close flyby early Tuesday. The image of Charon and the apparent chasms are "the first clear evidence of faulting and surface disruption on Charon," William McKinnon, a scientist with the mission's geology and geophysics team, said in a NASA web post. "New Horizons has transformed our view of this distant moon from a nearly featureless ball of ice to a world displaying all kinds of geologic activity."
Pluto and Charon, which is half the dwarf planet's size, make up what scientists describe as a "binary planet," orbiting a common center of mass well above Pluto's surface, rotating in gravitational lockstep every . days. Planetary scientists believe Charon formed from debris blasted into space when a large body slammed into Pluto in the distant past. Other remnants of the collision make up the dwarf planet's four other known moons.
The latest image from New Horizons, captured on July , shows a -mile-wide crater in Charon's southern hemisphere with bright rays extending from its circumference that indicate a relatively recent impact. In this case, "relatively recent" means sometime in the last years or so.
Charon's north polar region also is intriguing. It is roughly miles across and much darker than the surrounding terrain. Scientists are hopeful that increasingly sharp pictures and other data from New Horizons will help explain the differences in brightness. The wood-shingled summer house is considered quaint by today's East Hampton standards, but it was a proper mansion when it was built in .
An immaculate garden bloomed out back, surrounded by walls imported from Spain sheltering it from the grey, stormy winds of eastern Long Island. But the home's reputation came not from its grey garden, but from its eccentric inhabitants. Had they been nobodies, perhaps Albert and David Maysles never would have shown up to make their documentary, "Grey Gardens." But Big Edie and Little Edie WERE somebodies. They were the black sheep of the Bouvier family, aunt and cousin to none other than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Phelan Beale, a wealthy lawyer, had bought the home for his wife in . Back then their lives were full of high society must-haves -- country clubs, debutante balls and the like. But when Beale divorced his wife, Little Edie came home to take care of her mother, and for the next -some years, their lives (and the house) unraveled together.
Little Edie: "Any little rat hole, even on th Avenue, I would like better." The film finds the duo living in a single room, eating liver pate and ice cream, surrounded by trash, cats, and other wildlife, including raccoons living in the walls which they fed like pets. It was big news when the country Board of Health tried to evict them, but the ladies of Grey Gardens refused to leave. �
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