Pluto and Charon close-ups bring surprise for Nasa scientists

The distance of the New Horizon from Earth makes transmitting the photos faster impossible.

Scientists do not know how Pluto formed such big mountains, the tallest of which is almost as high as the Canadian Rockies.

Again, there is a lack of craters, suggesting a relatively young surface that has been reshaped by geologic activity.

This week, we were given the chance to see a new world for the first time again.

Those mountains are less than 100,000 million years old – regarded by scientists as “youthful” in a 4.56-billion-year-old solar system.

This afternoon we got two new images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. A new close-up of a small region on Pluto’s surface also reveals towering ice mountains, up to 11,000 feet high.

NASA says that unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto can not be heated by “gravitational interactions” with a much larger planetary body. Scientists can now see craters and regions of dark-reddish ground.

“Who would have supposed that there were ice mountains?” project scientist Hal Weaver said.

“Charon blew our socks off”, said deputy mission manager Cathy Olkin.

The long-awaited images are being released after being downlinked from New Horizons.

New Horizons Flight Controllers celebrate after they received confirmation from the spacecraft that it had successfully completed the flyby of Pluto, Tuesday, July 14, 2015 in the Mission Operations Center (MOC) of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Maryland.

In addition to the photos, scientists are thrilled at the huge amounts of data that New Horizons will beam back to Earth over the next 16 months, which will help to improve our understanding of Pluto.

The mission team has told New Horizons this week to send down only some of the data it carries.

Applause broke out as the spacecraft made its “phone-home” contact with Earth and all systems were reported intact. “The team constantly since launch thought, ‘Every day we’re closer to Pluto, every day we’re closer to Pluto, ‘ ” he says.

As is often the case, new data throws previously-held theories into doubt, and Pluto is no different.

“Once again we have achieved a historic first”, said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. The United States is now the only nation to visit every single planet in the solar system.