Icy Mountains of Pluto Revealed in New Pics by NASA

Agencies:  The small ice-and-rock planet Pluto has a range of mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet above its surface, show new close-up pictures released by US space agency NASA today.

The mountains are said to be formed less than a 100 million years ago, which suggests Pluto’s surface may still be geologically active today. The mountains, which were found close to Pluto’s equator, are younger than the Himalayas on Earth, which were formed some 225 million years ago.

The pictures were taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which completed a historic fly-by of Pluto and its accompanying five moons yesterday. The close-up image was taken about 1.5 hours before New Horizons closest approach to Pluto, when it was 770,000 kilometers from the surface of the planet, according to NASA.

The New Horizons mission – launched in 2006 has travelled over 4.8 billion kilometres at the speed of 45,000 kilometres per hour.

It will take about 16 months for New Horizons to transmit back all the thousands of images and measurements taken during its pass by Pluto. By then, the spacecraft will have travelled even deeper into the Kuiper Belt, heading for a possible follow-on mission to one of Pluto’s cousins.

Pluto circles the sun every 248 years in a highly tilted orbit that creates radical changes from season to season. Pluto travels closer to the sun than the orbit of Neptune before it cycles back into the solar system’s deep freeze more than 40 times farther away than Earth.

Scientists have many questions about Pluto, which was still considered the solar system’s ninth planet when New Horizons was launched in 2006. Pluto was reclassified as a “dwarf planet” after the discovery of other Pluto-like spheres orbiting in the Kuiper Belt, the region beyond the eighth planet, Neptune.