We know that Pluto may have a liquid ocean beneath its surface, but how many have seen the dwarf planet’s icy mountains? NASA’s New Horizons space probe captured amazing images of mountains at the edge of Pluto’s heart-like region Tombaugh Regio that measure up to 11,000-feet high and can be best compared to North America’s Rocky Mountains.
Researchers determined that Pluto’s relatively thin coating of methane, carbon monoxide and nitrogen ices on its surface was not strong enough to form mountains, so they are most likely composed of water-ice bedrock. To date, New Horizons successfully completed first exploration of the Pluto system in July 2015, followed by the farthest flyby in history, with its flight past Arrokoth on New Year’s day in 2019.
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It’s hard to imagine something so far away. One thing that makes this distance tangible is how long it takes for us on Earth to confirm that the spacecraft received our instructions. This went from almost instantaneous to now being on the order of 14 hours. It makes the extreme distance real,” said Alice Bowman, the New Horizons mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
