A NASA spacecraft captured images of Ultima Thule, a trans-Neptunian object more than 4 billion miles from Earth. The New Horizons spacecraft, which was launched in January 2006, flew past an oddly-shaped asteroid at travelling at a speed of more than 36,000mph. The new images of Ultima Thule are resolved at just 110 feet per pixel, the highest resolution pictures of the strange body New Horizons has received.

The frozen space rock known as 2014 MU69 is up to 4.1 billion miles from Earth.

John Spencer, a New Horizons deputy project scientist told Space.com: “Whether these features are craters produced by impactors, sublimation pits, collapse pits or something entirely different is being debated in our science team.”

New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern told Space.com: “Getting these images required us to know precisely where both tiny Ultima and New Horizons were as they passed one another at over 32,000mph in the dim light of the Kuiper Belt, a billion miles beyond Pluto, noted Spencer.

"This was a much tougher observation than anything we had attempted in our 2015 Pluto flyby.”

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