Where is Wright Mons on Pluto?
Wright Mons is centered at 21.36° south, 173.24° east, near the middle of Hyecho Palus, a sunken plain south-west of Sputnik Planitia, with Tenzing Montes to the east and north-east and Piccard Mons to the south. The gazetteer counts Pluto's longitudes eastward from 0° to 360° and gives the same 173.24° east. The International Astronomical Union adopted the name in 2019, for the brothers who built and flew the first powered airplane; on Pluto, mountains are named after historic pioneers who crossed new horizons in the exploration of the Earth, sea and sky.
Is Wright Mons an ice volcano?
Possibly. In 2015 New Horizons scientists suggested that Wright Mons and Piccard Mons could have formed by the eruption of ices from beneath Pluto's surface, and that is still an interpretation, not a finding. The New Horizons team's map shows a mountain 155 kilometers wide and 3.5 to 4.7 kilometers high, with a steep-walled pit about 45 kilometers wide and 3.5 to 4.5 kilometers deep in its top. Its outer flanks are covered with hundreds of overlapping mounds 10 to 15 kilometers wide and hundreds of meters high. The height of its rim and the depth of its pit far exceed those of impact craters elsewhere on Pluto, which is why the team rules out an impact and considers the mountain built up.
What does Wright Mons look like as a 3D print?
A ring around a hole. Its entry frames about 215 kilometers, so on a model 200 millimeters across the mountain fills about 145 millimeters and its pit about 40. The relief in that view comes out at about 7 millimeters at true scale and about 14 millimeters at the 2x Pluto models start at, more than most of Pluto gives, because the frame is small and the pit is deep. Above 2x its slopes start to look spiky.
The smallest region the generator frames on Pluto is about 166 kilometers across, which Wright Mons, 165 kilometers wide, just fills. The data is posted at 300 meters but resolves relief about a kilometer across, so the mounds on its flanks, 10 to 15 kilometers wide and only hundreds of meters high, are near the limit of what it holds, and anything smaller is smoothed away.
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.