New Horizons skims Pluto at 14 kilometers per second; mountains and glaciers fill the first close images

For nine and a half years, New Horizons crossed the solar system toward a planet no spacecraft had ever visited. On July 14, 2015, it passed within 12,500 kilometers of Pluto's surface at nearly 14 kilometers per second, cameras locked on a world previously known only as a blurry smudge. Onboard rode a small container of Clyde Tombaugh's ashes, the man who discovered Pluto in 1930. The images that came back showed glaciers, mountains, and a heart-shaped plain nobody had predicted…