As revelers on the East Coast celebrate the arrival of a new year, scientists will be crossing another kind of frontier 4 billion miles from the sun.

Early on Jan. 1, NASAs New Horizons probe is scheduled to have a close encounter with the most distant planetary object that humans have ever studied.

The spacecraft, which zipped by Jupiter in 2007 and Pluto in 2015, is now making its way toward 2014 MU69 a mysterious chunk of rock and ice in an almost entirely unexplored region of space.

The object is nicknamed Ultima Thule most distant in Latin combined with the ancient Greeks name for the worlds northernmost place . The New Horizons mission team said the nickname refers to a place beyond the known world . Ultima Thule is roughly the size of New York City and orbits the sun once every 297 years , according to National Geographic .