Informally dubbed “Ultima Thule” last year by the team leading NASA’s New Horizon mission, asteroid (486958) 2014 MU69 is located in the Kuiper Belt about a billion miles beyond Pluto. In January it became the most remote object ever visited by a human spacecraft. Not content to simply accept the awesome feat of engineering, however, the outrage mob soon had its say, slamming the US space agency for choosing a nickname with tangential connections to Nazis.

“The name has some unsavory connotations,” wrote Newsweek’s Meghan Bartels. “It was adopted by the forerunners to the Nazi party, and the term remains in use by modern so-called alt-right groups.”

Some opponents went even further, suggesting employees at NASA were in on a scheme to use the cryptic Nazi reference on purpose.

NASA previously defended the title, with New Horizon’s principal investigator Alan Stern insisting “just because some bad guys once liked that term, we're not going to let them hijack it.” On Tuesday, however, the agency appears to have done just that, scrapping Ultima Thule altogether in favor of a new name: “Arrokoth,” meaning “sky” in several Native American languages.