Second Mountain Range Rises From the Heart of Pluto

Newly released images taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft show a second range of mountains in Pluto’s heart-shaped, bright region, named Tombaugh Regio, or Tombaugh Region, after Pluto’s discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh.

The peaks are estimated to be one-half mile to one mile high, roughly the same height as the Appalachian Mountains in the United States. The first close-up images of Pluto turned up mountains towering about 2 miles above the surface. The second group of mountains  is about 65 miles northwest of the previously discovered range and situated between bright, icy plains and a dark heavily cratered region.

“There’s a complex interaction going on between the bright and the dark materials that we’re still trying to understand,” geologist Jeff Moore, with NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., said in a statement.

The bright region, known as Sputnik Planum, is relatively free of craters, indicating a surface that is as young as about 100 million years old. The darker, cratered areas likely date back billions of years.

The image was taken by New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14 as the spacecraft passed 48,000 miles from Pluto.  At that distance, features as small as a half-mile are visible on Pluto’s surface. The picture was relayed back to Earth on July 20.

From Discovery News