First look at Pluto surface
Icy mountains on Pluto and a new, crisp view of its largest moon, Charon, are among the several discoveries announced by NASA’s New Horizons team, just one day after the spacecraft’s first-ever Pluto flyby. A new close-up image of an equatorial region near the base of Pluto’s bright heart-shaped feature shows a mountain range with peaks jutting as high as 3 500m above the surface of the icy body. The mountains on Pluto likely formed no more than 100-million years ago – mere youngsters in a 4,56-billion-year-old solar system. This suggests the close-up region, which covers about 1% of Pluto’s surface, may still be geologically active today. Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.