Ultima Thule
NASA has released new images of the Ultima Thule. Pictured: In this handout photo provided by NASA, the object nicknamed 'Ultima Thule' is photographed from the New Horizons spacecraft on January 1, 2019. It was taken from a range of 85,000 miles (137,000 kilometers). At left is an enhanced color image taken by the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), produced by combining the near infrared, red and blue channels. The center image taken by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) has a higher spatial resolution than MVIC by approximately a factor of five. At right, the color has been overlaid onto the LORRI image to show the color uniformity of the Ultima and Thule lobes. Getty Images/NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has captured and released the most detailed image of the Ultima Thule yet, along with other photos.

Taken during a recent flyby of the icy object in the Kuiper Belt region, the latest images of Ultima Thule reveal even more details, such as the bright ring-like features and dark pits, whose origins remain unknown.

The new Ultima Thule images were taken just 6.5 minutes before the New Horizons probe's closest approach to the object on New Year's Day. At the time, the spacecraft was 4,109 miles (6,628 kilometers) from Ultima Thule — whose official name is 2014 MU69 — and 4.1 billion miles (6.6. billion kilometers) from Earth, according to the New Horizons mission team. The probe's closest approach of Ultima Thule so far is 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers).

New Horizons deputy project scientist John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement that the mission team is still trying to figure out just how exactly the craters on the Ultima Thule's surface were created. "Whether these features [the pits] are craters produced by impactors, sublimation pits, collapse pits or something entirely different is being debated in our science team," he said.

New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, also of SwRI, explained in a statement that capturing the latest images of Ultima Thule had been a "stretch goal" and there had been a chance that they would only be able to capture a part of the object or even none of it.

"But the science, operations and navigation teams nailed it, and the result is a field day for our science team! Some of the details we now see on Ultima Thule's surface are unlike any object ever explored before," Stern added.

After launching in 2006 and traveling through the solar system for 13 years, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made its historic flyby of the Ultima Thule, the most distant object ever explored by mankind, on Jan. 1. So far, it has been revealed that the icy object is 21 miles long (34 kilometers) and is located around 1 billion miles (1 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto, which New Horizons zoomed past in July 2015.

Previous images captured by the New Horizons probe and released by NASA revealed that Ultima Thule has a shape of a snowman, with a bright "collar" where the icy object's two lobes meet.

More data and images of the Ultima Thule are expected to be released in the next 18 months.

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