UPDATE: NASA has confirmed that their New Horizons mission to Pluto was a flawless success. Learn more about the announcement in our latest post: "IT'S OFFICIAL: NASA has taken us to Pluto for the 1st time."

At 7:49 a.m. ET on Tuesday, NASA celebrated a monumental moment in history: The space agency's New Horizons spacecraft completed its nearly 10-year mission to Pluto.

New Horizons was the first spacecraft designed for Pluto and, incidentally, is now the first to visit the distant icy world.

NASA streamed its countdown to the moment New Horizons was scheduled to make its closest pass of the dwarf planet, which you can see on YouTube if you missed it live.

But the New Horizons team isn't out of the woods just yet.

At the time of its historic approach to Pluto, New Horizons was too busy collecting information about Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, to send a signal to Earth confirming that everything went smoothly.

That crucial message was not expected until 8:53 p.m. ET on Tuesday.

"That [message] is going to be a very highly anticipated event because it's going to be sort of putting the cherry on top," Alan Stern, principal investigator for the mission, said Monday in a NASA news briefing.

NASA will stream live coverage of the incoming message starting at 8:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday. Here's the LiveStream feed below:

NASA also has a way you can experience the flyby in real time with the app "Eyes on Pluto." The app uses the calibrations on New Horizons to simulate when and where the spacecraft is in reference to Pluto.

"The picture in picture view shows you where the spacecraft is looking and what its advanced instruments can see," NASA says. "You can use a 'live' mode to see what New Horizons is doing right now, or preview the flyby of the Pluto System.”

Pluto is one of thousands of objects in a distant region of our solar neighborhood called the Kuiper belt, which is filled with relics of the early solar system. By studying Pluto, scientists hope to learn more about how Earth and the rest of the solar system formed more than 4 billion years ago.

"Today, science takes a great leap observing the Pluto system up close and flying into a new frontier that will help us better understand the origins of the solar system," John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a statement.