Why the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft looks like a snowman

Just over a year ago, courtesy of NASA’s New Horizons mission, we were treated to images of 2014MU69, a small object 6.6 billion kilometers from the sun – making it the most distant object to have ever been visited by a spacecraft. It was described, variously, like a snowman, a bowling pin, or a peanut. What we were seeing was a picture of one of the oldest and most primitive bodies in the solar system. New Horizons took only a handful of minutes to fly past the object at its closes