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William Lager

Photos: New Horizons to Pluto

Mountains of Pluto
The latest close-up images of a region near Pluto's equator, released July 15, reveal a giant surprise: a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet above the surface of the icy body. The mountains are probably composed of Pluto's water-ice "bedrock."
NASA | Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory | Southwest Research Institute

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Launched in 2006 atop an Atlas 5 rocket, the New Horizons probe traveled nearly 3 billion miles and took more than nine years to make a flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto.

The plutonium-powered probe passed Pluto, its main satellite Charon and other moons on Tuesday. During the brief flyby, the probe devoted all of its power to data collection, effectively going dark to the Earth. Eventually New Horizons phoned home with an "all-clear" status update.

The next stage of the mission is to slowly send all of that data back, a task that may take 16 months over a datalink that is able to communicate at just 600 to 1,200 bits per second, a speed comparable to a dial-up modem of the mid-1990s. Images, and other new discoveries, from the flyby may take make many weeks to be released as NASA scientists sift through the data.

Clarification (July 16, 2015): An earlier photo caption in this gallery suggested that, with this week's Pluto flyby, the United States became the first country to have visited all the planets in the solar system. Pluto, however, is considered by scientists to be a dwarf planet. The story has been updated.

Gallery
7 of 7
New Horizons lifts off
In the beginning: A Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket lifts off of Pad 41 carrying NASA's Pluto New Horizons spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 19, 2006.
Matt Stroshane | Getty Images
1 of 7
Mountains of Pluto
The latest close-up images of a region near Pluto's equator, released July 15, reveal a giant surprise: a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet above the surface of the icy body. The mountains are probably composed of Pluto's water-ice "bedrock."
NASA | Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory | Southwest Research Institute
2 of 7
Pluto
This July 13 image provided by NASA shows Pluto, as seen from the New Horizons spacecraft.
NASA via AP