Nasa's New Horizons Probe Shows Second Mountain Range in Pluto's Heart

The new, less lofty mountain range lies near the bright, heart-shaped south-western margin of Pluto's Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region).

The newly-discovered frozen peaks are estimated to be 1 to 1.5 kilometres high, about the same height as the Appalachian Mountains in the US.

The new range is just west of the region within Pluto's heart called Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain). The peaks lie some 110 kilometres north-west of Norgay Montes (icy Norgay Mountains) discovered first by New Horizons on July 15.

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This newest image further illustrates the remarkably well-defined topography along the western edge of Tombaugh Regio.

"There is a pronounced difference in texture between the younger, frozen plains to the east and the dark, heavily-cratered terrain to the west," said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons team at Nasa's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

There's a complex interaction going on between the bright and the dark materials that we are still trying to understand, he added in a space agency statement.

While Sputnik Planum is believed to be relatively young in geological terms - perhaps less than 100 million years old - the darker region probably dates back billions of years.

The bright, sediment-like material appears to be filling in old craters (for example, the bright circular feature to the lower left of centre).

This image was acquired by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (Lorri) on board New Horizons from a distance of 77,000 kilometres and sent back to Earth on July 20.