Craters on Pluto and Charon: Characteristics and Impactor Population

Although both Pluto and Charon have a surprising number of young-looking surfaces, there are still plenty of craters for impact-phenomenon enthusiasts. We will present size, morphology, ejecta, and albedo pattern statistics, in addition to correlations with color/composition where possible. We use images and topography from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI; Cheng et al., 2008, SSR 140, 189-215) and data from the Ralph (Reuter et al., 2008, SSR 140, 129-154) color/composition instruments.Impactor sizes will be estimated from relevant scaling laws for cold water ice (see details in Singer and Stern, 2015, ApJL 808, L50). For Pluto, an image strip at 125 m px^-1 includes some cratered terrains, and much of the encounter hemisphere (the anti-Charon hemisphere) will be covered at ~400 m px^-1. The ~smallest craters observable at these pixel scales (using a 5 pixel limit) would be ~0.63 km, and ~2 km in diameter, respectively, with impactor diameters estimated at ~50 m, and ~200 m. However, it is likely that degradation processes may obscure small craters, thus this lower observation limit will depend on terrain type. Additionally, lighting and observation geometries vary across the disk, which may make crater detection difficult in some areas. All of the illuminated portions of Pluto (during its 6.4 day rotation period) were imaged at ~20 km px^-1 or better during the encounter. The highest resolution images of Pluto (at ~80 m px^-1) occur in a narrow strip and are not scheduled for downlink before the DPS.The highest resolution Charon coverage (a strip at ~160 m px^-1), a broader swath at 400 m px^-1, and the entire encounter hemisphere (the sub-Pluto hemisphere) at ~890 m px^-1 may yield craters as small as 0.8, 2, and 4.5 km in diameter, respectively. The inferred impactor sizes for these craters would be ~50 m, 160 m, and 440 m.Although the dataset is limited, we will discuss what constraints can be put on the impactor population. This work was supported by the NASA New Horizons project.