The new image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft shows a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet (3.5 km) above the dwarf planet’s surface.
This close-up image was taken about 1.5 hours before New Horizons closest approach to Pluto, when the craft was 47,800 miles (77,000 km) from the dwarf planet’s surface. The image easily resolves structures smaller than a mile across. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.
The mountains likely formed no more than 100 million years ago. This suggests this region, which covers about 1% of the dwarf planet’s surface, may still be geologically active today.
“This is one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the Solar System,” said New Horizons team member Dr Jeff Moore of NASA’s Ames Research Center.
The scientists base the youthful age estimate on the lack of craters in this scene. Like the rest of Pluto, this region would presumably have been pummeled by space debris for billions of years and would have once been heavily cratered – unless recent activity had given the region a facelift, erasing those pockmarks.
Unlike the moons of Solar System’s gas giants, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.
“This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,” said team member Dr John Spencer of Southwest Research Institute.
According to the researchers, the mountains on Pluto are probably composed of water-ice ‘bedrock.’
Although methane and nitrogen ice covers much of the planet’s surface, these materials are not strong enough to build the mountains. Instead, a stiffer material, most likely water-ice, created the peaks.
“At Pluto’s temperatures, water-ice behaves more like rock,” said team member Dr Bill McKinnon of Washington University, St. Louis.
“Pluto New Horizons is a true mission of exploration showing us why basic scientific research is so important,” added Dr John Grunsfeld of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
“The mission has had nine years to build expectations about what we would see during closest approach to Pluto and Charon.”
“Today, we get the first sampling of the scientific treasure collected during those critical moments, and I can tell you it dramatically surpasses those high expectations,” he said.
“Home run! New Horizons is returning amazing results already. The data look absolutely gorgeous, and Pluto and Charon are just mind blowing,” said Dr Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, principal investigator for New Horizons.
