The zoom

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It also looks like a mountain "range", so tectonics?

-kap

Huge ice mountains.

What the hell? How is this thing still active?

Where does the heatflow come from? Decay of long-lived isotopes? Can't be insolation or Kelvin-Helmholtz, right?

Has to be tectonics of some kind.

Do I see a Triton like black smudge in that image????

John Spencer -- "You do not need tidal heating to power ongoing activity in an icy body."

-the other Doug

Amazing! Pluto is really like Mars of the outer Solar System!
Those mountains looks like Charitum Montes near Argyre Planitia.

Try the youtube stream? I don't know if it's really different, but it has none of the audio issues I had with the one at nasa website.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX9I1KyNa8M

No audio problems on the uStream stream.

I was able to get Ustream to work, and that is OK. Thanks.

Charon - wow! I did not expect that; maybe my argument that Charon's surface did not appear cratered held water after all.

Better than i could have expected. What an amazing system. I knew it would be beautiful, but had no thought that it would be so active.

Phil

Pluto seems like it's even more active than Mars. Charon itself looks a lot like Mars! Those cliffs around the equator are reminiscent of the border marking the north-south hemispheric dichotomy on Mars. Although, if Charon has a "low" hemisphere, it looks like it would be the south, the opposite of Mars.

The mountains on Pluto remind me, I daresay, of mountains on Io.

Absolutely incredible new images. Alan mentioned a paper about the origin of the N2 atmosphere that was just accepted for publication today - here's the paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.00913

Wow.
Really glad that the canyons did not rotate out of view on Charon.
And Pluto itself... good gracious!

One initial thought: cratering in the Kuiper Belt represents a very different process than the rest of the Solar System.

Release full res image here.

http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-icy-mountains-of-pluto

Charon http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/th...e/nh-charon.jpg
Hydra http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/th...h-hydra_1_0.jpg

Charon is ready for her closeup...

http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/charon-s...-varied-terrain

I found a cool little paper on Pluto heat flow:

http://es.ucsc.edu/~fnimmo/website/Guillaume_Pluto.pdf

Basically - heat comes from radiogenic decay in the silicate core, and it was within the range of possible outcomes for Pluto to be active, it just required a higher Potassium concentration (decay of 40K dominates radiogenic heat production and that's a volatile, so concentration couldn't just be assumed to be chondritic)

Of course, it follows from seeing water-ice tectonics at the surface and no equatorial bulge that there is likely a subsurface ocean. And the geophysical model is consistent with that. Amazing.

Contrast stretch of Charon to make subtle features show up better.

Phil

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Comparisons to other planets, or moons don't hold water ether. Pluto, and Charon are truly Unique, and stand out on their own! The Mountains, Valley's, and Mesa's on Pluto are huge relative to Plutos size. What a sight it would be to stand on top of one.

I was calling the dark area on Charons pole "The Eye of Charon", because in the lower res photos that is exactly what it looked like to me. An eye. Seeing the chasms, and re-surfaced areas was just mind blowing. We expected something of this nature, but not like this. I think the Charon grazing Pluto in its early history theory will hold water.

Congrats to the NH team, and thank you for providing us this chance to see the last of the classic worlds.

A major seismic event happened across the entire globe of the Earth today.

"This event is what we would expect to see if millions of swear jars suddenly burst, all across the civilized world," a noted seismologist stated.

-the other Doug

I was honestly losing hope for my experimental process. Pluto seemed to do ok-ish, but Charon was looking nothing like I was getting. Pleasantly surprised by this.

Heres my experimental process for Charon on July 9 compared to the recent release.
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Nearly all visible elements in the recent image can be accounted for in the previous.

Look who's trending on Twitter.

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One question elakdawalla asked but was not addressed at the press conference was something I'd wondered myself - assuming Charon was formed by a giant impact, might that impact have taken place more recently than the formation of the Solar System? This could have provided a more recent heat source for both Pluto and Charon, though the timescale of tidal locking and orbit circularization doubtless sets a lower bound on the age of the current Pluto system.

"The whale" is now informally "Cthulu Regio"

Did john_s really just say "Cthulhu Regio (informally)"?!

(and Firefox's spellchecker doesn't balk at Cthulhu, but does balk at Regio!)

[ed. - I guess he did!]

Slight deconvolution to improve resolution -- The 1st released Closeup of Pluto
Congrats to the Whole NH Team and the members of this forum!
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Great image of Charon and that section of terrain on Pluto! I must admit I was hoping for more releases. I guess more patience is required

Giant ice mountains! And everything else.

That was a really great press conference.

More importantly, the team seems to have applied for the Heart to be officially called Tombaugh Regio. Alan Stern: (paraphrased) "It stood out like a beacon in the very first images we got down from Pluto, we were in no doubt that it should be named after the person who discovered Pluto".

Yikes!

Here's an extremely crude attempt to locate the hires frame on the full disc frame:
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You can see that we're seeing just a fingertip (fintip?) of the whale/Cthulhu/dark region.

According to the plan, there should be more hires frames to come to the north and east, which should show the transition to dark and light/heart/Tombaugh...

That dark streak going diagonally to the lower right shadowed corner from the mountains; is that real or an artifact? Reminds me of the dark seams in some of the Mars panoramas, but this isn't stitched.
Edit: it's more visible in Fredk's mosaic, going vertically down the inset.

My take on the amazing LORRI picture of Pluto:

Ouch, the bottom of my jaw has rug burns.

So I've heard three possible sources of heat driving the geology (or a combination of them):

1. Radioisotopes
2. Liquid water still releasing heat from the original formation
3. Impact Event with Charon

Thanks Emily, and others, for this chart:

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http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/space-...icy-bodies.html

Water appears to be almost everywhere!

Charon looks incredible. That is definitely stealing the show for me!

I wonder if there's any consensus on that dark polar area on Charon - it looks almost like the dark area is it's a huge, deep irregular topographic depression to me (though granted there's not much help from the illumination angle). Is anyone else seeing that? Could that be real or illusion?

This dark area does look a little like the dark plume regions on Triton. There are also lots of little dark chains in the smoother area too

I've seen little mention of one of the things that leaps out to me from the folded mountain region – the charcoal-y looking smudge near bottom center on the image.

Hugely speculative to say it's deposition from a vent, of course. But that's where my mind keeps going.

re Explorer1's comment about the dark streak: I took that to be what was being discussed at the press briefing when a questioner referred to "something that sortof looks like a fault" and member of the science team agreed, without elaboration, that it sortof looked like a fault.

edit: xflare you beat me to it! 8^)
Glad you followed up on your earlier comment

Or maybe the tidal locking happened more recently than we thought? What if Charon was only recently captured by Pluto (or formed in a big impact more recently than we'd assumed, as Emily asked)?
I'm not sure they really know enough to definitively say "right, clearly there's other processes happening that can keep an icy world active for 4.6 billion years so we don't need tidal heating for that" at this stage. Clearly such processes do exist, but they surely can't be that certain about whether they're enough to cause all of what we're seeing here. Usually our assumptions about something we've never seen before end up being disproved on further analysis.

Those ice mountains remind of Europa s surface up close although much higher at 11000 ft. I think Europa s topography did not surpass hundreds of meters?

The chasms of Charon are VERY interesting.

Am I the only one that is seeing what appears to be a mountain formation that seems to stretch across the equatorial band? Perhaps all the way around?

My first reaction when I saw the close-up image of Pluto was "this is the surface of a comet or an asteroid". My bet is that at least some depressions in that image, like the big central one, are sublimation pits.

There are small and large ripples visible in the tombaugh regio region of the highest resolution image. JPEG compression artifacts or dunes/hills?

How confident are we about the cratering rate in the region of Pluto's orbit? Could the apparent youth of the mountains be due to an overestimate of impactors out there?

What amazing pictures and discoveries! Thanks and congratulations to all the New Horizons people for making us discover these new landscapes!

Hi, long time lurker here. Sorry to break my silence but I had a question: Isn't anyone reminded of Titania when seeing Charon?

Titania from Voyager:

An an amateur, I wondered about gravitational heat released as something higher up sinks into lighter stuff lower down. This is the general mechanism driving some of the internal heat coming from Saturn. Pluto's a very, very different sort of beast than Saturn, but I wondered if some other materials might drive that in Pluto. Convection from phase changes in H2O?