Traveling at the speed of light, the images took just four hours to cross the 3 billion miles separating New Horizons from Pluto.
According to NASA, this image -- a shot of a region near Pluto's equator -- shows icy mountains reaching as high as 11,000 feet.
Scientists were surprised at the apparent absence of craters on the planet's surface. Presumably, Pluto has been "bombarded" by other objects in the Kuiper Belt region. But its lack of craters suggests "this is a very young surface," deputy team leader John Spencer told reporters Wednesday.
The Pluto closeup is the culmination of over a decade of work by the New Horizons team, who launched the spacecraft in 2006.