12/03/2026
🛰❄️ After a 9-year journey across 3 billion miles, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reached Pluto and revealed something no one expected.
Towering mountains made of ice.
This remarkable image shows Pluto’s rugged landscape, where peaks rise up to 3,500 meters (11,000 feet) high. Instead of rock, these mountains are believed to be made largely of water ice, which behaves like solid bedrock in Pluto’s extremely cold environment.
Before New Horizons flew past Pluto in July 2015, we had only blurry images of this distant world. The mission transformed our understanding of Pluto, revealing glaciers of nitrogen ice, hazy blue skies, and a surprisingly active surface.
Even at the edge of the Solar System, Pluto turned out to be far more dynamic than anyone imagined.
