<p>NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which successfully made a historic flyby of Pluto, has discovered young ice mountains on the dwarf planet which are as high as 11,000 feet and about 100 million years old.<br /><br /></p>.<p>New close-up images of a region near Pluto's equator show a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body, NASA said.<br /><br />The mountains likely formed no more than 100 million years ago - mere youngsters relative to the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system - and may still be in the process of building, said Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team leader Jeff Moore of NASA's Ames Research Centre in California.<br /><br />That suggests the close-up region, which covers less than one per cent of Pluto's surface, may still be geologically active today, researchers said.<br /><br />Moore and his colleagues base the youthful age estimate on the lack of craters in this scene.<br /><br />Like the rest of Pluto, this region would presumably have been pummelled by space debris for billions of years and would have once been heavily cratered - unless recent activity had given the region a face-lift, erasing those pockmarks.<br /><br />"This is one of the youngest surfaces we've ever seen in the solar system," said Moore.<br />Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.<br /><br />"This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds," said GGI deputy team leader John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.<br /><br />The mountains are probably composed of Pluto's water-ice "bedrock."<br /><br />Although methane and nitrogen ice covers much of the surface of Pluto, these materials are not strong enough to build the mountains. Instead, a stiffer material, most likely water-ice, created the peaks.<br /><br />"At Pluto's temperatures, water-ice behaves more like rock," said deputy GGI lead Bill McKinnon of Washington University, St Louis.<br /><br />The close-up image was taken about 1.5 hours before New Horizons closest approach to Pluto, when the craft was 77,000 kilometres from the surface of the dwarf planet.<br /></p>
<p>NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which successfully made a historic flyby of Pluto, has discovered young ice mountains on the dwarf planet which are as high as 11,000 feet and about 100 million years old.<br /><br /></p>.<p>New close-up images of a region near Pluto's equator show a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body, NASA said.<br /><br />The mountains likely formed no more than 100 million years ago - mere youngsters relative to the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system - and may still be in the process of building, said Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team leader Jeff Moore of NASA's Ames Research Centre in California.<br /><br />That suggests the close-up region, which covers less than one per cent of Pluto's surface, may still be geologically active today, researchers said.<br /><br />Moore and his colleagues base the youthful age estimate on the lack of craters in this scene.<br /><br />Like the rest of Pluto, this region would presumably have been pummelled by space debris for billions of years and would have once been heavily cratered - unless recent activity had given the region a face-lift, erasing those pockmarks.<br /><br />"This is one of the youngest surfaces we've ever seen in the solar system," said Moore.<br />Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.<br /><br />"This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds," said GGI deputy team leader John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.<br /><br />The mountains are probably composed of Pluto's water-ice "bedrock."<br /><br />Although methane and nitrogen ice covers much of the surface of Pluto, these materials are not strong enough to build the mountains. Instead, a stiffer material, most likely water-ice, created the peaks.<br /><br />"At Pluto's temperatures, water-ice behaves more like rock," said deputy GGI lead Bill McKinnon of Washington University, St Louis.<br /><br />The close-up image was taken about 1.5 hours before New Horizons closest approach to Pluto, when the craft was 77,000 kilometres from the surface of the dwarf planet.<br /></p>