NASA releases first close-up images of Pluto

Scientists have released the first close-up images of Pluto and its big moon Charon. And they say they're amazed.

“Charon just blew our socks off,” said Cathy Olkin, one of the project scientists with the Southwest Research Institute.

The long-awaited images were unveiled Wednesday in Maryland, home to mission operations for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.

A zoom-in of Pluto reveals an icy range about as high as the Rockies — but Pluto, according to NASA, "cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body." This means some other process must be building these mountains.

“This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,” said a New Horizons mission scientist, John Spencer.

The mountains, NASA said, are not more than 100 million years ago. A NASA press release called them "mere youngsters in a 4.56-billion-year-old solar system."

On Charon, deep troughs and canyons can be seen, and, to the scientists' great surprise, there are no apparent impact craters.

The images were collected as New Horizons swept within 7,700 miles of Pluto on Tuesday, becoming Pluto's first known visitor in its 4.5 billion-year existence.

Scientists didn't know until Tuesday night, when the spacecraft phoned home, that the encounter was a success.

“Well, I had a pretty good day [Tuesday], how ‘bout you?” the project’s principal investor, Alan Stern, said to a room full of chuckles and applause.

New Horizons already is 1 million miles beyond the dwarf planet, and 3 billion miles from Earth.

Al Jazeera and wire services