The Tenzing Montes (formerly Norgay Montes) are a range of icy mountains on

Pluto Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of Trans-Neptunian object, bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Su ...

, bordering the southwest region of

Sputnik Planitia Sputnik Planitia (formerly Sputnik Planum) is a large, partially glaciated basin on Pluto. About in size, Sputnik Planitia is partially submerged in large, bright glaciers of solid nitrogen, nitrogen ice. Named after Earth's first artificial s ...

and the nearby

Hillary Montes The Hillary Montes or (less officially, Hillary Mountains) are a mountain range that reach above the surface of the dwarf planet Pluto. They are located northwest of Tenzing Montes in the southwest border area of Sputnik Planitia in the sout ...

and Wright Mons. With peaks reaching in height, they are the highest mountain range on Pluto, and also the steepest, with a mean slope of 19.2 degrees.

Naming

The mountains, first viewed by the ''New Horizons'' spacecraft on 14 July 2015, and announced by NASA on 15 July 2015, are named after the

Nepal Nepal, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is mainly situated in the Himalayas, but also includes parts of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. It borders the Tibet Autonomous Region of China Ch ...

ese mountaineer

Tenzing Norgay Tenzing Norgay (; ''tendzin norgyé''; May 1914 – 9 May 1986), born Namgyal Wangdi, and also referred to as Sherpa Tenzing, was a Nepalese-Indian Sherpa mountaineer. On 29 May 1953, he and Edmund Hillary were the first confirmed to ...

, who, along with Sir Edmund Hillary, made the first successful ascent of the highest peak on

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to Planetary habitability, harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being an ocean world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all ...

Mount Everest Mount Everest (), known locally as Sagarmatha in Nepal and Qomolangma in Tibet, is Earth's highest mountain above sea level. It lies in the Mahalangur Himal sub-range of the Himalayas and marks part of the China–Nepal border at it ...

(29 May 1953). The mountains were informally called ''Norgay Montes'' by the ''New Horizons'' team, but that name was later changed from ''Norgay'' to ''Tenzing''.Both ''Tenzing'' and ''Norgay'' are given names, but ''Norgay'' is often mistaken for a surname. On 7 September 2017, the name ''Tenzing Montes'' was officially approved together with the names of Tombaugh Regio and twelve other nearby surface features.

Highest peaks

Several

massif A massif () is a principal mountain mass, such as a compact portion of a mountain range, containing one or more summits (e.g. France's Massif Central). In mountaineering literature, ''massif'' is frequently used to denote the main mass of an ...

s within Tenzing Montes reach elevations of more than 4 km above the surrounding terrain. The table below is based on Table 3 in. The Tenzing Montes rise up to high, about twice as high as the

. In comparison,

rises base-to-peak (though to an elevation of above sea level).''Mount Everest'' (1:50,000 scale map), prepared under the direction of Bradford Washburn for the Boston Museum of Science, the Swiss Foundation for Alpine Research, and the

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, 1991,

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References