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takyon writes:

The New Horizons team is preparing for their spacecraft to fly by 2014 MU₆₉ (nicknamed Ultima Thule) on Jan. 1, 2019. At the current planned flyby distance, the spacecraft's instruments will take higher resolution imagery of the object(s) than what was seen at Pluto:

Because Ultima is small — probably just 25 km (16 miles) or so in diameter — it will remain just a point of light to New Horizons until about 2 days before the close flyby. However, in the final hours around closest approach, New Horizons will be able to map Ultima at higher resolutions than we achieved at Pluto, because we will fly by Ultima at a much closer range than we did at Pluto

We will obtain geologic mapping resolutions as high as 35 meters (110 feet) per pixel using LORRI. By comparison, our highest resolution Pluto mapping was about 80 meters (260 feet) per pixel.

With the Ralph imager, we also plan to acquire color images of Ultima with resolutions as high as 330 meters (0.2 miles) per pixel, and composition mapping at a resolution of 1.8 km (1.1 miles) per pixel. Stereo imaging made on approach will map the surface topography of Ultima at about 80 meters (260 feet) per pixel.The first detailed imagery of Ultima will be downlinked to Earth once the spacecraft has completed its main flyby objectives late on January 1st, and will be released to the public after processing and image analysis on January 2nd. More images, as well as spectra and other data sets, will be downlinked on January 2nd, 3rd, and 4th — so get ready to learn a lot about Ultima in the first week of the new year! Then the spacecraft will slip behind the Sun as seen from Earth and image transmissions will cease for 5 days until the spacecraft reappears and can resume data transmissions.

The total data volume collected on the Ultima flyby will be close to 50 gigabits. Because New Horizons is so far from Earth, about 6 billion km (4 billion miles), its data transmission speed is now only about 1,000 bits per second. This limitation, and the fact that we share NASA's Deep Space Network of tracking and communication antennas with over a dozen other NASA missions, means that it will take 20 months or more, until late in 2020, to send all of the data about Ultima and its environment back to Earth.

The team has until Dec. 16 to determine if there are any hazards (such as dust or satellites) that will necessitate changing the closest approach distance from 3,500 km to 10,000 km.

[According to the Deep Space Networkpage, at the time of this writing, the New Horizons probe is at a distance of 6.56 billion km with a round-trip light time of 12.16 hours. We're gonna need some faster light! --Ed.]

See also: Why NASA chose Senegal to observe a frozen world beyond Pluto

Previously: One Last Stellar Occultation of 2014 MU69 to be Observed Before Jan. 1 New Horizons Flyby
New Horizons Spacecraft Approaches 2014 MU69; OSIRIS-REx Nears 101955 Bennu

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