NASA rang in the new year with a flyby near an icy planetary body roughly 1 billion miles away from Pluto — making it the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft.

NASA confirmed Tuesday the spacecraft – New Horizons – completed its flight past Ultima Thule at 12:33 a.m. on January 1.

"This is what leadership in space exploration is all about," said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine in a post to Twitter. He also said New Horizons is the first spacecraft to directly explore an object "that holds remnants from the birth of our solar system."

Ultima Thule, which sits in the Kuiper Belt, about 4 billion miles away from Earth, is either one object with two connected lobes, sort of like a spinning bowling pin or peanut still in the shell, or two objects orbiting surprisingly close to one another. A single body is more likely, they noted. An answer should be forthcoming Wednesday, once better, closer pictures arrive.

Team members and guest at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory gathered to celebrate both the New Year and the expected flyby of New Horizons, which launched in 2006.

The mission marked the first reconnaissance of Pluto, completing its closest approach to the planet in 2015. NASA said the goal of the New Horizons mission is to explore Pluto and Kuiper Belt to study "the origins and outskirts of our solar system."

Last week, Bridenstine confirmed the agency's social media accounts would be active despite a partial government shutdown.

"It's the farthest exploration of worlds in history and without NASA able to get the word out, I think it's going to be very much diminished for the public and that's an unintended consequence of this shutdown," New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern told Florida Today.

Contributing: Florida Today and The Associated Press.

Follow Brett Molina on Twitter: @brettmolina23.