Where are Tenzing Montes on Pluto?
Tenzing Montes are centered at 15.61° south, 177.38° east, at the south-western edge of Sputnik Planitia, east and north-east of Wright Mons. They are part of a broken ring of angular mountains along the western side of the plain, with Hillary, Zheng He, al-Idrisi and Baret Montes to the north. The range spans 180° east, which OrbitStudio frames in one piece because it counts Pluto's longitudes from 0° to 360°, as the gazetteer does. When New Horizons found them in July 2015, NASA called them the Norgay Montes; the International Astronomical Union adopted Tenzing Montes in 2017, after Tenzing Norgay.
How high are Tenzing Montes?
Up to 6.2 kilometers. The New Horizons team measured four of its peaks at 6.2, 5.7, 5.3 and 5.0 kilometers from base to crest, the first the tallest in its table of Pluto's highest mountains. The blocks are steep-sided and come to points or craggy tops, unlike the flat-topped blocks of Zheng He and Hillary Montes, and with a mean slope of 19° the range is the steepest of the terrains in the team's table of slopes. The mountains are thought to be huge blocks of Pluto's icy crust, broken up and moved, though how is not clear.
What do Tenzing Montes look like as a 3D print?
Sharp blocks beside a smooth floor. Its entry frames about 370 kilometers, so on a model 200 millimeters across the relief in that view comes out at about 4.5 millimeters at true scale and about 9 millimeters at the 2x Pluto models start at, with the ice of Sputnik Planitia flat beside the range. The blocks, 5 to 25 kilometers across, are about 3 to 14 millimeters wide on the model; the data resolves relief about a kilometer across, so they keep their shapes, and finer detail is smoothed away.
It is the region we built our first Pluto test model from: a hexagon puzzle 200 millimeters across, framing 410 kilometers across 180° east, at 2x, with 8.1 millimeters of relief on its top. The picture used when this page is shared is that model, as the generator made it.
What is OrbitStudio?
OrbitStudio turns real elevation data into 3D-printable models. You pick a region of Pluto on a globe or a flat map, choose a jigsaw puzzle or a solid ornament, and get ready-to-print files with terrain and borders already separated and colored. No CAD, no mesh repair. The heights come from New Horizons' stereo topography, posted at 300 meters per pixel.
Trying it is free and needs no account: pick a region, generate it and turn it around in 3D. Downloading the model — STL files and pre-colored 3MF files for Bambu Studio or OrcaSlicer — takes a Plus or Merchant plan, or one credit from a pass. The generator covers the Moon, Mars, Mercury and Venus too.
Other landmarks
The night sky, too
OrbitStudio Sky, the night-sky tool, turns the sky over any place, on any date from 1900 to 2100, into a 3D-printable star map. Its STL is free.