Mountains draped across the landscape must be made of water ice, said mission leader Alan Stern. Louis, when he first saw the pictures early this morning. “I screamed,” said planetary scientist Bill McKinnon of Washington University in St. Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, shows off a diversity of terrains that include 10-kilometer-deep canyons. However, it was a close-up view of a 240-kilometer-wide swath of terrain on Pluto just south of the “heart” - now dubbed Tombaugh Regio in honor of Pluto’s discoverer - that elicited the most gasps from the gathered crowd. And swaths of landscape are relatively smooth with few craters, which means the moon has been actively resurfacing itself over the last several billion years. The dark pole appears to be a relatively thin film, as evidenced by a crater that has smashed through it and dug up something bright underneath. Troughs and cliffs 1,000 kilometers long slash across the moon.

“We thought Charon would be an ancient terrain covered in craters,” said Olkin. The pictures included the first ones to show the shape of one of the dwarf planet’s smaller moons, Hydra, plus a more detailed look at the largest moon, Charon. Mission scientists showed off three new pictures (and one spectrum) captured by New Horizons as the spacecraft hurtled toward Pluto July 14. Future images will have two times as much detail. “There’s nothing like it.” One of Pluto’s smaller moons, Hydra (shown), looks like a pixelated potato.

“We’re not saying Pluto looks like this world or that world,” said planetary scientist Cathy Olkin of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. “Who would have supposed ice mountains?” asked New Horizons project scientist Hal Weaver at a July 15 news conference. Let that sink in: water-ice mountains that could hold their own next to the Rockies.

And Pluto has mountains of water ice over 3,000 meters high. Charon has canyons up to 10 kilometers deep. Dynamic worldsĪn elongated Hydra is composed of largely water ice.

Space engineers star system asteroids