NASA's Horizons Spacecraft To Probe Pluto Moon For Underground Ocean

An anonymous reader writes NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is moving towards Pluto to explore Charon, one of Pluto's moons. The aim of the mission is to search of evidence of an ancient underground ocean on the moon. "Our model predicts different fracture patterns on the surface of Charon depending on the thickness of its surface ice, the structure of the moon's interior and how easily it deforms, and how its orbit evolved," said Alyssa Rhoden of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "By comparing the actual New Horizons observations of Charon to the various predictions, we can see what fits best and discover if Charon could have had a subsurface ocean in its past, driven by high eccentricity."

Ocean of what

[rossdee]

Here on Earth we think of Oceans of water, but way out at Pluto's orbit it could be something esle (ammonia, methane, hydrogen, nitrogen...

Re:quite a rapid flyby

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction: this probe has the fastest launch velocity of any probe so far.
The Helios probes had the fastest velocity of any probe so far (because it was falling towards the Sun), and Voyager 1 has the fastest velocity right now (because of velocity boosts from Jupiter and Saturn).
More info. [wikipedia.org]