(Image source from: Pluto's largest moon Charon)

In what can be dubbed as an exciting new feat for NASA, the agency's New Horizons spacecraft has successfully clicked maiden pictures of Pluto's largest moon, the icy Charon. The moon was apparently discovered 35 years ago in 1978 by James Christy of the Naval Observatory.

The robotic spacecraft equipped with highest-resolution telescopic camera, was launched on 19 January 2006. It took as many as six photographs of the Charon. With this, it became the first ever spacecraft to scout Pluto — its five moons, and the whole of Kuiper Belt.

An animated Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator said, "We're excited to have our first pixel on Charon, but two years from now, near closest approach, we'll have almost a million pixels on Charon-and I expect we'll be about a million times happier too!"

The spacecraft shot the images from a distance of 880 million kilometers through its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI). The images were clicked on July 1 and July 3.

"The image itself might not look very impressive to the untrained eye, but compared to the discovery images of Charon from Earth, these 'discovery' images from New Horizons look great!" said New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "We're very excited to see Pluto and Charon as separate objects for the first time from New Horizons." he added

AW: Suchorita Dutta