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New Horizons Beams Back New Pluto Pics

Of planet's surface and moons.

NASA unveiled several new photos of Pluto and its moons on Wednesday, courtesy of New Horizons, the first spacecraft to successfully fly by Pluto. A close-up of Pluto's equator region (pictured below in black and white) surprisingly shows no impact craters, indicating the surface is less than 100 million years old, one of the youngest surfaces ever seen in the solar system. The photo also shows mountains, likely composed of water-ice. A new, high-res picture of Pluto's biggest moon, Charon (shown below, with a dark region near the northern pole that scientists have been calling "Mordor"), and a new, pixellated image of smaller moon Hydra were also unveiled. Pluto's now-famous "heart" region has also been officially renamed Tombaugh Regio, after the discoverer of the planet, Clyde Tombaugh.