Ultima thule

Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle! / Here in thy harbors for a while / We lower our sails; a while we rest / From the unending, endless quest.

It is impossible to define a reason for the Gulf Settlements attaining this unenviable notoriety, unless it is owing to the remoteness of their locality, and the kind of Ultima Thule that part of Australia seems to be.

[…]the metropolis of our far west, and about as neat and picturesque an assize town as ever was, with its fine old castle overhanging the river, and, like many of these Ultimæ Thules of civilisation, having several good shops and handsome churches !

With substantial public input, the team has chosen “Ultima Thule” (pronounced ultima thoo-lee”) for the Kuiper Belt object the New Horizons spacecraft will explore on Jan. 1, 2019.

Since NASA’s New Horizons mission left its rendezvous with the dwarf planet Pluto in late 2015, it has been preparing for another close encounter, with cold classical Kuiper belt object (CCKBO) 2014 MU₆₉, also known as Ultima Thule

Flyby images of (486958) Arrokoth (Ultima Thule, 2014 MU₆₉) show a comparatively bright "necklace" in the neck, or cleft between its two lobes, in contrast to its generally low albedo.