Ultima Thule, the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft from Earth, turns out to look like a crude snowman made by sticking a small ball of dirty red snow on top of a larger one.
On New Year’s Day the US New Horizons probe flashed past Ultima Thule, 6.5bn km from Earth, en route for the outermost regions of the solar system after visiting Pluto in 2015. On Wednesday evening Nasa issued the first indications of the shape and colour of Ultima Thule, whose existence was not known until 2014.
“It is a snowman,” said Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator. “There are two spherical lobes. We’ve called the larger one Ultima and the smaller one Thule.” End to end, Ultima Thule is 33km long — not quite big enough to bridge the Strait of Dover, the narrowest point between England and France.