The Geology of Pluto and Charon

Pluto as imaged by New Horizons.

This is an excerpt from my post on Astrobites:

Title:  The Geology of Pluto and Charon Through the Eyes of New Horizons
Authors: Jeffrey M. Moore, William B. McKinnon, John R. Spencer, et al., including the New Horizons team
First Author’s Institution: NASA Ames Research Center
Status: Published in Science

The New Horizons mission to Pluto and Charon, launched when Pluto was still officially a planet, gave us the best images of the dwarf planet and its largest moon that we might ever see in our lifetime.  Less than a year after its July 14, 2015 fly-by, the New Horizons team has published a preliminary geological examination of the two bodies.  Predicted to have a rather boring landscape unchanged for billions of years, the surfaces of Pluto and Charon have been discovered to be surprisingly complex and, for Pluto, still geologically active!