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A NASA spacecraft captured images of Ultima Thule, a trans-Neptunian object located more than 4 billion kilometers from the Earth. The New Horizons spacecraft, launched in January 2006, flew over a weird-shaped asteroid as it moved at speeds above 36,000 mph. The new Ultima Thule images are resolved at just 110 feet per pixel, the highest resolution images of the strange body that New Horizons has received.
The frozen space rock known as MU69 2014 is 4.1 billion kilometers from the Earth.
John Spencer, an assistant scientist with the New Horizons project, told Space.com: "Whether these features are craters produced by impactors, sublimation pits, collapse pits or something quite different , our scientific team is currently debating. "
Alan Stern, Senior Investigator for New Horizons, told Space.com, "To get these images, we needed to know exactly where the smaller Ultima and New Horizons were. Pluto, Spencer noted.
"It was an observation much more difficult than anything we had attempted during our flyby of Pluto in 2015."
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The Southwest Research Institute said: "The science, operations and navigation teams have understood this well and the result is a field day for our science team!
"Some of the details we see now on the surface of Ultima Thule do not look like anything ever explored before."
According to Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the 2014 MU69 is the most distant object humanity has ever considered so closely.
The asteroid is nearly 20 miles long and is thought to have not changed since the early days of the solar system.
The first batch revealed that the asteroid was in the form of a shady, deformed peanut composed of two lobes that touched each other and were called a binary contact.
More pictures showed that the rock looked more like a pancake than a bump.
The images revealed strange freckles and dark bumps on the asteroid that scientists are trying to understand.
John Spencer said, "Whether these features are craters produced by impactors, sublimation sinks, sinks or something completely different, our science team is debating."
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