NASA's New Horizons is poised for a historic New Year's Day flyby

It was back in August that NASA showed off images from its New Horizons spacecraft which had just spotted its next flyby target sitting a whopping 100 million miles away. Well, in the months since that updated the probe has been speeding along at over 30,000 miles per hour and, as luck would have it, it'll reach its current destination on New Year's Day. The probe's current target is an object known as Ultima Thule. Ultima Thule is a frozen chunk of material left over from the earliest days of o...