New data from the NASA New Horizons mission team show that the Kuiper Belt Object Ultima Thule turned out to be a different shape than it was assumed after the first photographs were taken. This became known from a short message posted in the photo gallery of the New Horizons website.
Initially, it was assumed that MU69 (so far officially called the object with which the probe approached on New Year's Eve) consisted of two contiguous] spheres of almost ideal shape. But after the team got side-by-side shots of the craft flying past Ultima Thule against the background of stars, it turned out to have a more flattened shape. "Ultima" (the larger part) is more like a pancake or a flat stone, and the smaller "Thule" "looks like a crushed walnut."
The bottom reconstruction (in the figure) represents the best possible synthesis of all data so far, but still carries some uncertainty, since the whole large section of Ultima Thule was hidden from view and not illuminated by the Sun during the New Horizons flyby. The dotted blue lines indicate uncertainty in this hemisphere, which suggests that Ultima Thule may be either less or flatter than shown in this figure.