On this day, in 2018, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft entered in “encounter mode” with Ultima Thule, the first object in the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt that the spacecraft visited since its flyby of Pluto in 2015. This is the most distant body of the Solar System ever studied. Comprised of two bodies that may have collided in the past and became attached to each other, this is an example of the small icy bodies that wander in this remote region of the Solar System and which may have preserved the same features since the epoch when planets were still forming. Ultima Thule (an island in the cold and distant North, according to popular imagination in the period of the Roman Empire) is a temporary name, the official name being 2014 MU69 until a definitive designation is given by the International Astronomical Union.