Snowman shape of distant Ultima Thule revealed by Nasa’s New Horizon

A new picture returned from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft shows it to be two objects joined together – to give a look like a “snowman” the small icy world known as Ultima Thule.

New Horizons encountered Ultima 6.5 billion km from Earth and set a record of the most distant ever exploration of a Solar System object. The previous record was set by New Horizons when it flew past the dwarf planet Pluto in 2015 with Ultima 1.5 billion km further out.

It orbits the Sun in a region of the Solar System known as the Kuiper belt – a collection of debris and dwarf planets.

Ultima’s only really the size of something like Washington DC, and it’s about as reflective as garden variety dirt and it’s illuminated by a Sun that’s 1,900 times fainter than it is outside on a sunny day here on the Earth. “We were basically chasing it down in the dark at 32, 000 mph (51, 000 km/h) and all that had to happen just right”. The SwRI scientist said.