After nine and a half years, the New Horizons spacecraft has lifted the veil on the icy world. Pictured are the probe's key instruments





The first ever high-resolution image of Pluto has been beamed back to Earth revealing 11,000ft (3,350 metre) mountains made of ice.
The remarkable image, released alongside new pictures of Pluto's moons Charon and Hydra, provides evidence that geological activity is still taking place on the icy world.
Scientists were shocked to see mountains as high as those in the Rockies that likely formed 100 million years ago - mere youngsters relative to the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system. Nasa says they may still be in the process of building.




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.
'We now have an isolated small planet that is showing activity after 4.5 billion years,' said Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator. 'It's going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing board.'




The first images of Charon, showing an area called Mordor, the darkest area near the North pole. A swath of cliffs and troughs stretches about 600 miles (1,000km) from left to right, suggesting widespread fracturing of Charon's crust, likely a result of internal processes. At upper right, along the moon's curving edge, is a canyon estimated to be 4 to 6 miles (7 to 9km) deep


Spectra images show an abundance of methane ice on Pluto. But there are differences in the ice across the surface. 'We just learned that in the north polar cap, methane ice is diluted in a thick, transparent slab of nitrogen ice resulting in strong absorption of infrared light,' said New Horizons co-investigator Will Grundy

The image shows a swath of cliffs and troughs stretches about 600 miles (1,000km) from left to right, suggesting widespread fracturing of Charon's crust, likely a result of internal processes.
On the upper right, along the moon's curving edge, is a canyon estimated to be 4 to 6 miles (7 to 9km) deep.
Mission scientists are surprised by the apparent lack of craters on Charon. South of the moon's equator, at the bottom of this image, terrain is lit by the slanting rays of the sun, creating shadows that make it easier to distinguish topography.
Even here, relatively few craters are visible, suggesting a young surface that has been reshaped by geologic activity.
The image has been compressed to reduce its file size for transmission to Earth. In high-contrast areas of the image, features as small as 3 miles (5 kilometers) across can be seen.
The uncompressed version still resides in New Horizons' computer memory and is scheduled to be transmitted at a later date.
Nasa will now spend the next 16 months studying the data, releasing both images and scientific observations along the way.
The image of Pluto, along with today's images of the moons Charon and Hydra, are just the beginning.
New Horizons is now around one million miles away from Pluto after making its closes flyby probe flew past the dwarf planet at 7:49 a.m. EDT (11:49 GMT) yesterday morning.


Pictures of Pluto's largest moon Charon have also allowed scientists to see enormous chasms and craters on the surface. A 200 mile wide dark region around the north pole has proved to be particularly baffling

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3162894/11-000-foot-high-mountains-ice-geologically-active-surface-Stunning-image-surface-Pluto-revealed.html#ixzz3g4mdLwPh
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Wow!

Signs of life after 4.5 billion years? Of course its alive...its a planet, each planets has its uniqueness...just because its Icy doesn't mean its dead na...

spaceing

waooooooooo! this is a landslide achievement.

9 Good years of travel....wonders of d world