Pictures from Pluto exploration

An image of Pluto from the New Horizons spacecraft. On Friday, July 17, 2015, scientists said they found vast frozen plains spanning a couple hundred miles in the heart-shaped area of Pluto, next door to its big, rugged mountains of water ice.

A model of the New Horizons spacecraft that passed with 7,800 miles of Pluto on display at a NASA news conference July 15, 2015. The 1,050-pound piano sized probe was launched January 19, 2006 aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

A newly discovered mountain range lying near the southwestern margin of Pluto’s Tombaugh Region, situated between bright, icy plains and dark, heavily-cratered terrain is shown in this image acquired by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 48,000 miles and sent back to Earth on July 20, 2015.

A photo taken by NASA€’s New Horizons spacecraft of Charon, Pluto’€™s largest moon, and its dark patch, informally called Mordor.

This photo of Charon includes a close up view of a depression with a peak, at right.

A large craterless plain on Pluto called Sputnik Planum can be seen in this NASA photo.The features might be signs of convection, caused by heat within the planet, or might be comparable to mud cracks, caused by the contraction of the surface.

New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, left, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Director Ralph Semmel, center, and New Horizons Co-Investigator Will Grundy of the Lowell Observatory hold a print of a U.S. stamp with their suggested update since the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto.