The New Horizons probe blew past “Ultima Thule” on News Year’s Day in 2019, and managed to snap an image of the object on the way. Unfortunately, bandwidth is limited when the probe is so far away that radio signals take 6 hours to reach Earth, so scientists only got a partial, fuzzy image in the following days. Fortunately, the probe eventually managed to transmit the full image, which NASA just processed and released.



The oblique lighting of this image reveals new topographic details along the day/night boundary, or terminator, near the top. These details include numerous small pits up to about 0.4 miles (0.7 kilometers) in diameter. The large circular feature, about 4 miles (7 kilometers) across, on the smaller of the two lobes, also appears to be a deep depression. Not clear is whether these pits are impact craters or features resulting from other processes, such as “collapse pits” or the ancient venting of volatile materials.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – New Horizons Sends A Sharper Images of Ultima Thule