NASA Releases First Clear Images of Snowman-Shaped Ultima Thule

The images come a day after the space agency rang in the New Year with jubilation after receiving confirmation that the New Horizons spacecraft completed a successful flyby Tuesday of the most distant object ever explored in space.

The images confirmed that the object has two lobes, which have now been named Ultima (the bottom and larger lobe) and Thule (the top lobe), NASA officials said during the press conference.

“It’s two completely different objects that are now joined together,” said S. Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the mission.

(MORE: NASA's New Horizons New Year's Flyby of Distant Space Object a Space First)

The New Horizons spacecraft made contact with NASA around 10:15 a.m. ET Tuesday confirming the successful flyby past the object.

"We have a healthy spacecraft. We've just accomplished the most distant flyby," announced Alice Bowman, mission operations manager.

The news was greeted with cheers by officials and onlookers at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, home to Mission Control.

"Reaching Ultima Thule from 4 billion miles away is an incredible achievement. This is exploration at its finest," said Adam L. Hamilton, president and CEO of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "Kudos to the science team and mission partners for starting the textbooks on Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. We're looking forward to seeing the next chapter."

The spacecraft came within 2,200 miles of the tiny celestial body at 12:30 a.m. ET Tuesday, nearly 13 years after it launched from Earth in January 2006.

The spacecraft encountered the object previously known as 2014 MU69 approximately three and a half years after brushing past Pluto, previously the most distant object ever explored.

Ultima Thule orbits a billion miles beyond Pluto and has been locked in a state of deep-freeze preservation since the universe began some 4.5 billion years ago.

Because the object is hurtling through space at 31,500 miles per hour the encounter with New Horizons was described as "a bullet intersecting with another bullet," the Associated Press reported.

The object is so far away that it takes more than six hours for a command sent from Earth to reach New Horizons.

Capturing good images of the object could be tricky, as well. The light from the sun is so dim that it's only as bright as a full moon here on Earth.

Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, noted that the data already collected looks "fantastic."

"We're already learning about Ultima from up close," Stern said. "From here out the data will just get better and better!"