The New Horizons probe is approaching Ultima Thule, an  extremely far away, frigid cold, mysterious and very small piece of rock/ice/organic matter

"As the New Horizons spacecraft closes in on its target, Ultima Thule is getting brighter and brighter in the LORRI optical navigation images," New Horizons project scientist Hal Weaver, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said im a statement. "It's now standing out much more clearly among the sea of background stars."

New Horizons took the picture 33 hours before performing a record-setting engine burn to refine its course toward Ultima. The burn — the most distant ever conducted by a spacecraft — lasted 105 seconds and changed New Horizons' velocity by about 2.2 mph (3.5 km/h), mission team members said.

(486958) 2014 MU69 also known as Ultima Thule, is a trans-Neptunian object from the Kuiper belt located in the outermost regions of the Solar System. It was discovered by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope on 26 June 2014. The irregular shaped classical Kuiper Belt objecti a suspected is a suspected contact binary or close binary system and measures approximately 30 kilometers (19 miles) in diameter.

In August 2015, this object was selected as the next target for the New Horizonsprobe shortly after it had visited Pluto. The flyby will occur on 1 January 2019, which will make it the farthest object in the Solar System ever to be visited by a spacecraft. After four course changes in October and November 2015, New Horizons is on course toward 2014 MU69

On 13 March 2018, NASA announced that (486958) 2014 MU69 would receive the nickname Ultima Thule. The decision was based on the results of a public voting campaign. Ultima Thule, or Ultima for short, serves as an unofficial name for the object until the discovery team proposes an official name to the IAU that is consistent with existing naming guidelines. The New Horizons team has decided not to go forward with the formal naming process until after the flyby, when the properties of (486958) 2014 MU69 are known well enough to choose a suitable name.

The probe remains on course to cruise within just 2,200 miles (3,500 km) of Ultima Thule (which is officially known as 2014 MU69) at 12:33 a.m. EST (0533 GMT) on Jan. 1. That's more than three times closer than New Horizons got to Pluto during the spaceraft's epic flyby of the dwarf planet on July 14, 2015. 

That encounter showed Pluto to be a complex world with a stunning diversity of landscapes, from tall water-ice mountains to vast nitrogen-ice plains to "bladed" terrain similar to the penitente fields of the high Andes. 

New Horizons' encounter with Ultima, which lies about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion km) beyond Pluto, should be similarly revealing. Astronomers have estimated Ultima's size — about 23 miles (37 km) wide — but they know little else about the object. Indeed, it's unclear if Ultima is a single body or a close-orbiting pair.

New Horizons launched in January 2006, tasked with returning the first-ever up-close looks at Pluto. The Ultima Thule flyby is the centerpiece of the probe's extended mission.