New Horizons Reveals
Ice Mountains on Pluto

By JONATHAN CORUM JULY 15, 2015

A day after its successful flyby, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft sent back the first close-up photographs of Pluto, revealing a young surface dotted with ice mountains. The piano-size spacecraft traveled nine years and three billion miles to study the dwarf planet and its five moons.

Pluto seen by the New Horizons spacecraft on July 14

25 miles

PLUTO

Area of
detail

MOUNTAINS ON PLUTO One of the first images returned to Earth after New Horizons’ Pluto flybyshows a small portion of Pluto’s surface seen from 47,800 miles away. Ice mountains up to 11,000 feet high — comparable to the height of the Rockies — cast shadows across a relatively smooth plain. The lack of craters indicates that the surface is quite young, no more than 100 million years old. This photo was taken early on Tuesday morning and shows an area just under the bright heart shape on Pluto’s surface.

Charon seen by the New Horizons spacecraft on July 14

100 miles

Mordor

Canyon
(4 to 6 miles deep)

CANYONS ON CHARON A new image of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon. The moon has a dark patch, informally called Mordor, at its north pole. The image was taken late Monday from a distance of 289,000 miles.

Hydra seen by the New Horizons spacecraft on July 14

10 miles

PIXELATED HYDRA New Horizons also took a low-resolution image of Hydra, one of Pluto’s small moons. The potato-shaped moon is 27 miles wide and 20 miles tall, and is so reflective that it is likely composed of water ice. Each large pixel in this image is two miles across.