English: Just over 24 hours before its closest approach to Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule, the New Horizons spacecraft sent back the first images that began to reveal Ultima’s shape. The original images have a pixel size of 6 miles (10 kilometers), not much smaller than Ultima’s estimated size of 20 miles (30 kilometers), so Ultima is only about 3 pixels across (left panel). However, image-sharpening techniques combining multiple images show that it is elongated, perhaps twice as long as it is wide (right panel). This shape roughly matches the outline of Ultima’s shadow that was seen in observations of the object passing in front of a star made from Argentina in 2017 and Senegal in 2018. Much more detailed images, and other kinds of data, was gathered as New Horizons reached its closest approach to Ultima at 12:33 a.m. EST on Jan. 1 2019. A small sample of these images and other data was returned to Earth over the next few days, though it took about 20 months to downlink the full data set. New Horizons was approximately 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometers) from Ultima when this image was taken on Dec. 30, 2018.