This afternoon, scientists on NASA’s New Horizons mission shared the first close-up images of the distant, frozen space rock their spacecraft whizzed by on New Year’s Day. The pictures bring the strange object into a clearer focus — and it looks like a lumpy snowman. In fact, it’s not really one object, but two lobes that are touching each other, what’s known as a contact binary.
The images were taken on January 1st around 12:33AM ET, when the New Horizons spacecraft sped past the rock at a whopping 32,000 miles per hour. The vehicle, which came within 2,200 miles of the object’s surface, used all seven of its onboard instruments to gather as much data as it could about the rock during the flyby. Those instruments included two cameras...