If you had journeyed to Pluto, you'd be arriving on a distant, frigid world that is fascinating and unfamiliar to anything on our planet. Coming in, you'd first notice that Pluto is no longer the sleek sphere of classic myth but a rocky world with varied landscapes. The most shot location you'd most be hoping to target is the heart-shaped region called Tombaugh Regio, in honor of Clyde Tombaugh, the first person to see Pluto in 1930.
This massive, light-colored region is one of Pluto's most famous regions and serves as a declaration of mankind's imprint on this distant dwarf world.
Your car would most probably end up in the west lobe of the aforementioned heart, a gargantuan plain called Sputnik Planitia. It is a huge, wide plateau, which is flatter in composition, consisting of the greater part being made of nitrogen ice, strewn with ridges and craters scattered lightly upon it.
The ground here is not rock but glacial gas crust that will break if pressure is applied to it, but your descent would be pointless because Pluto has so little gravity. You would be very light because Pluto's gravity is only 6% of Earth's, and so you would be bouncing lots of times higher and floating through the very thin atmosphere with ease, but also at a slow speed. You would be strolling across a ground ice lake, but far, far colder, with a temperature zone between -375- and -400-degrees Fahrenheit (-226 to -240 degrees Celsius). It is a cold so severe and ongoing that Pluto's surface is among the coldest locations within our solar system.
If you ventured outside, it would be a night sky with stars and the Sun a very bright star, not larger than the tip of a pin against the darkness. Sunlight on Pluto is approximately 1/900 of our planet's sunlight, and it gives an endless twilight even during the daytime. As there is no thick air, there will be no blue sky and clouds to scatter the light, and thus, never will the stars stay stationary, and the universe will be beautiful with closeness.
If you came here with the life expectancy that Pluto's thin atmosphere is partly gaseous, when it is nearer the Sun, then you would have thin hazes of haze covering you, but not such as the sky on your home planet. This gas, which is mostly nitrogen and trace quantities of methane and carbon monoxide residue, is too tenuous to breathe and to support life, and freezes up now and then and snows over in buckets as Pluto moves away from the Sun.
You glance about and notice mountains on the horizon, some 9,800 feet (3 kilometers) high, but they are not rock-solid mountains like those on Earth. Instead, they are ice acting as bedrock on Pluto due to extremely low temperatures and possibly capped by a white layer of methane frost, and thus snow white and possibly never having seen weather as we understand it.
These mountains may be valleyed and peaked, their forms created by geologic processes possibly continuing, which suggests Pluto is not a dead world but an inside-out hot one with the ability to warm up an ocean in the ground. The surface may also be composed of gigantic cracked plains and troughs, many hundreds of miles long, which bear witness to tectonic activity that has flexed the surface over billions of years.
In the distance, you may perhaps see Pluto's largest moon, Charon, filling the sky. Charon is considerably larger than our Moon, from Earth, since it's about half the size of Pluto itself, and the two are tidally locked in an alignment where they're constantly presenting each other the same face.
From the point of view of some of Pluto's perspectives, Charon would be stationary in the sky, a locked, giant companion never setting or rising, and Pluto's other small moons, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx, would creep very slowly through the starry firmament. There is silence profound, no whisper or sound of air, but only the quiet, icy expanse under an infinite night.
If you were to stand on the terminator, the boundary between day and night, you would be able to view the otherworldly sight of "Plutoshine," where the sun's gentle illumination is reflected off the surface of Charon and casts Pluto's terrain in an eerie, ghostly light. This gentle illumination also enhances features like the "bladed" terrain, where ridges of ice methane form enormous knife-shaped features, or the dark red stripes most likely made up of complicated molecules called tholins that give an area a reddish hue.
These tholins are formed when sunlight radiation illuminates methane and nitrogen and will rain down upon sections of the surface as a blanket of dust, perhaps leaving the ground sticky or gritty to the touch.
Your landing site can also be near one of Pluto's ice glaciers, where nitrogen ice flows slowly like Earth's lava, carving channels and sculpting the surface in thousands of years. In Sputnik Planitia, the nitrogen ice is churned and resurfaced by convection currents at a glacially slow rate, a cosmic lava lamp, so that your ground beneath can be active geologically but in ultra-slow motion. This question assumes Pluto to be a working planet and not an ice ball, and its processes might very well be the same as ours, but on really enormous, longer timescales and at unbelievably lower temperatures.
Earth would be unimaginable without high tech, as there is no liquid water, breathable air, or warmth. Its glacial cold would freeze out any material it touched instantly, and the feeble sun is not suitable for powering generation. But what is fascinating about Pluto is its mystery—a world of extremes with ice plains, rock mountains, and an abnormally starry silence. To tread on Pluto is to tread into a cold frontier, where the past of the solar system is trapped in ice and waits for a reader.
This former ninth planet, reduced now to a Kuiper Belt object, is the edge of human exploration, the portal to worlds we know and look yet further out into space.