Photographs from NASA’s New Horizons mission show Pluto’s mixed bag of terrains, including smooth plains that are crisscrossed by enigmatic troughs. Jeffrey Moore, the leader of the geology, geophysics and imaging team for New Horizons, discussed some more data on Pluto sent by the spacecraft during a news conference on Friday.

“When I saw this image for the first time, I decided I was going to call it not-easy-to-explain terrain. You can clearly see that we’ve discovered a vast craterless plain that has some strange story to tell”, he said.

Mission scientists are happy after New Horizons successfully made the approach to the dwarf planet after nearly 10-year voyage, but some features of Pluto have puzzled them as they never expected those.

During the flyby of Pluto, the spacecraft passed within 7,800 miles of Pluto’s surface on Tuesday. New Horizons spacecraft will have 7,800 miles of Pluto’s surface on Tuesday stored in its onboard memory by the time it finishes its observations at the end of the month.

Due to very large distance between Pluto and earth, communication between them has become slow. As of now, only about 2% of the data has been sent back to earth.

Mountains as tall as 11,000 feet were showed by the first up-close snapshot released on Wednesday. These mountains are made of water ice, not rock.

Dr. Moore described the new snapshot on Friday, saying the features on Pluto were near the mountains and did not have craters as appeared almost flat.