NASA’s New Horizon probe successfully flew past the tiny space rock, Ultima Thule, which lies in the outer reach of the Solar System on New Year’s Eve. The team who are working closely on the project New Horizon received signals from the spacecraft that the probe has been able to complete its mission.

During a press conference, scientists stated that they would be getting high-resolution pictures of the mysterious space rock, Ultima Thule clicked by the probe during the flyby in the late hours of 1st January. Hence, the public would be able to see the pictures on 2nd January. As promised, on 2nd January afternoon, scientists working on NASA’s New Horizon mission team revealed the first image of the mysterious space rock that lies in the Kuiper Belt.

The high-resolution image of the most distant space object ever visited was clicked by the probe while it whooshed past it. Thereby, a closer focus on the rock reveals that the rock mimics a bumpy snowman. Most importantly, it’s not a single rock, but two sections that touch each other, which is known as contact binary.

The pictures were taken around 12.33AM ET on 1st January, when the New Horizons space probe whizzed past the rock at a huge speed i.e., 32000 miles per hour.

The space probe that came within 2,200 miles of the target’s surface, made use of all of its seven onboard gadgets to collect as much information as it could about the rock during the fly-past. Those tools also included two cameras that were used to click the high-resolution images.

The reason to receive the image a bit late by the New Horizons’ mission team is because New Horizon space probe is presently 4.1 billion miles away from Earth, and one radio signal takes about six hours to reach our planet Earth.

Before 1st Jan, scientists had only blurred image of this space rock touted 2014 MU69, as it was impossible to track the 21 miles wide rock from such a distance. Currently, with New Horizon’s successful fly-past, a huge number of data and pictures are available to scientists.