Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes

This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (CNN) — A range of majestic mountains meets with endless plains. On Pluto, billions of miles from the sun's reach, they are likely both made of ice.

And this week, we are seeing them close-up with unprecedented clarity. Finally, two months after the New Horizons spacecraft flew by the dwarf planet at close range, the high-resolution images have arrived.

It has taken that long for NASA to download them. The transfer speed of data from the spacecraft at 2,000 bits per second makes an old dial-up modem with its 56,000 bits per second look like a speed demon.

It's complicated... Pluto's surface, that is. New close-ups from @NASANewHorizons #PlutoFlyby: http://t.co/gAjyhdHTmZ pic.twitter.com/HVRn2SBXw9 — NASA (@NASA) September 11, 2015

It will take NASA a year to transfer all the photos and data. The dump began arriving over the Labor Day weekend.

But judging by the first, crisp digital images, the wait has been worth it. They reveal a planet not frozen in place but with a complex landscape still developing.

Dunes?

The photos taken from New Horizons' closest approach of Pluto on July 14 — at 50,000 million miles away — reveal some surprises.

For example, there may even be dunes blown up by winds. But that would seem impossible on a planet with barely an atmosphere.

This 220-mile (350-kilometer) wide view of Pluto from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft illustrates the incredible diversity of surface reflectivities and geological landforms on the dwarf planet. The image includes dark, ancient heavily cratered terrain; bright, smooth geologically young terrain; assembled masses of mountains; and an enigmatic field of dark, aligned ridges that resemble dunes; its origin is under debate. The smallest visible features are 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers) in size. This image was taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers). (Photo: NASA/Johns Hopkins/SRI)

"Seeing dunes on Pluto — if that is what they are — would be completely wild, because Pluto's atmosphere today is so thin," said astronomer William B. McKinnon from Washington University in St. Louis.

"Either Pluto had a thicker atmosphere in the past, or some process we haven't figured out is at work. It's a head-scratcher."

And those gargantuan blocks of ice the size of mountains might be floating in flows of frozen nitrogen.

The spacecraft also picked up nice images of Pluto's moons. Photos of Charon — the largest one — reveal a mammoth crack, a tectonic fracture.