NASA's midnight discovery is about to be a lot more exciting than the ball drop

NASA is ringing in in the new year with a stellar discovery.

Just after the ball drops in Times Square early Tuesday morning, NASA's New Horizons probe will sail into the outer edges of the solar system. It'll do a fly-by of Ultima Thule, the "most distant solar system object ever explored," Space.com says.

New Horizons has spent years soaring through the solar system, flying past Pluto and toward the outer solar system in late 2015. Ultima Thule is about 18 miles across and located in the Kuiper Belt, which is full of asteroids and other icy objects, per NASA. It's about 1 billion miles past Pluto and 4 billion miles from the sun, making the Tuesday morning mission one of the farthest from Earth.

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At just about 12:33 a.m. EST on Tuesday, New Horizons will get within 2,200 miles of Ultima Thule, zipping by at 32,000 miles per hour. It'll collect data on Ultima Thule and send it on a 20-month digital journey back to Earth, CBS News reports.

If you get sick of whoever's performing this New Year's Rockin' Eve, watch the fly-by and press conferences discussing New Horizon's discoveries below. You can also follow along at the @NASANewHorizons Twitter feed. Kathryn Krawczyk