Instead, as New Horizons found, other craggy features that are of Pluto’s own making adorn its face: mountains, crustal fractures and canyons that wiggle in parallel near the North Pole.

Chun Wang, a Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur, paid an undisclosed amount for the mission. Some satellites are already in polar orbit, and researchers called it a routine flight.

When NASA’s New Horizons mission flew past Pluto in 2015, it gave humanity our first glimpse of a colossal depression on the isolated world. It's named Sputnik Planitia. Comparable in size to ...

Pluto is too far away from Earth to be seen with the naked eye. If you stood on Pluto's surface, the Sun would merely appear to be a very bright star. Although previous images showed that ...