New Horizons spots Pluto's snow-capped mountains
A string of snowcapped, frosty mountains dot a dark part of Pluto's landscape.
Scientists using photos taken by the New Horizons spacecraft have just found the mountains in Cthulhu Regio, a darkly colored part of the dwarf planet's surface that is slightly bigger than Alaska, according to NASA.
A mountain range found in the region is about 260 miles long, and the tops of the mountains appear to be capped with what could be methane ice condensed from Pluto's atmosphere, NASA added.
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"That this material coats only the upper slopes of the peaks suggests methane ice may act like water in Earth's atmosphere, condensing as frost at high altitude," John Stansberry, a New Horizons scientist, said in a statement.
Scientists think that mountains on Pluto are likely made of water-ice. Pluto's frigid temperatures allow water-ice to become hard enough to grow into giant structures like mountains as tall as the Rockies on Earth.
New Horizons is still working to beam back all of the data it collected during its historic July 2015 flyby of Pluto.
Because of downlink rates, it takes a while for New Horizons to send data back to Earth from about 3 billion miles away. In all, it will take more than 1 year from the time of the flyby for scientists to receive all of the information collected during the Pluto close approach.
In the mean time, scientists are still combing through the data they do have on the ground, making discoveries like these mountains.
New Horizons is now speeding to another target about 1 billion miles from Pluto.
The spacecraft should reach the object -- called 2014 MU69 -- in 2019, giving scientists their first up-close glimpse of the new world, assuming NASA grants the New Horizons team an extended mission.
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Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
