The first close-up photos of Pluto captured by the New Horizons spacecraft show the dwarf planet has mountains of ice as high as the Rocky Mountains on Earth, mission scientists say.
The images also show that Pluto and its largest moon Charon are geologically active, they say.
The dwarf planet was scanned by instruments aboard the space probe during a flyby of several hours, creating the images released Wednesday by NASA's New Horizons team.
One close-up image of the dwarf planet's equatorial region shows a range of mountains rising 11,000 feet above Pluto's icy surface. They are likely composed of the planet's bedrock layer of water ice, says mission scientist John Spencer.
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