New Horizons Mission To Ultima Thule Keychain

January 1, 2019 marked a historic encounter between the New Horizons spacecraft and the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule. This peanut or snowman shaped body is technically a contact binary of two separate objects, Ultima and Thule, joined together and orbiting the Sun through space 4 billion miles from Earth. Ultima Thule is likely an ancient space rock for collection of materials that aggregated during the formation of the Solar System and could consist of rocks and ices frozen in time.