NASA's New Horizons captured video of Pluto's moon Nix showing water-ice mountains up to about 11,000 feet tall that, due to extreme cold, behave like rock; the LEISA spectrometer data help scientists understand Nix's geology and the young surface of Pluto's moons.
The 3.0 update adds an official hotel on each island pier, sidelining many fan-made hotels; players are reshaping their piers to stand out within Nintendo’s new bounds, showing that creativity persists even as official structures reshape the game's hotel culture.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ free 3.0 expansion arrived a day early, adding features like a resort hotel and a ‘Slumber Island’ dream world for multiplayer island building. The Switch 2 edition and enhanced 3.0 update are now live, bringing sharper visuals, mouse controls, GameChat, and online multiplayer support increased from eight to 12 players. Upgrading to Switch 2 costs $5, while the full Switch 2 version is $65; the rollout aligns with the anticipated January 15 date.
The Animal Crossing: New Horizons 3.0 update introduces Slumber Islands for a Creative mode, a Seaside Hotel unlocked via Kapp’n, hotel-ticket rewards, Resetti’s reset services, expanded storage, Lego furniture, and a new precise terraforming system. Day one tips include checking mail for Slumber Islands, visiting and decorating the hotel rooms to earn tickets, using Resetti (first day free, then 60,000 bells per use), expanding storage at Resident Services, exploring Slumber Island for a pure creative sandbox, and learning the new one-square-at-a-time terraforming controls (hold L and move). You can also invite villagers via Amiibo and grab new items from Gram’s catalog.
The Verge reports that Animal Crossing: New Horizons is getting a major 3.0 update that arrives for both Switch and Switch 2 as a free update, adding quality-of-life features like multi-item crafting, new Slumber Islands, and strafing, plus Zelda-inspired collaborations. A separate paid Switch 2 upgrade launching January 15 will bring exclusive features such as mouse controls and 12-player online co-op. Fans like Soleil and Fernando are excited to return to cozy island life and multiplayer decorating, while hoping for livelier villagers and more building customization.
Nintendo unexpectedly announced a Switch 2 upgrade and a free update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, reigniting player interest after years of minimal support, with players reflecting on their islands' states and their personal memories with the game.
A new study suggests that skyscraper-sized methane ice spires, forming bladed terrain, cover about 60% of Pluto's equator, mainly on the non-encounter hemisphere, based on indirect surface roughness analysis from NASA's New Horizons data.
The New Horizons spacecraft has demonstrated a groundbreaking method of interstellar navigation using optical stellar astrometry and parallax measurements, which could enable future spacecraft to navigate autonomously to distant stars like Proxima Centauri by measuring the apparent shifts in nearby stars' positions relative to background stars as it travels through space.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft took a 6.25 GB, 15-month-long data transmission to send back a detailed, color-accurate image of Pluto, captured during its 2015 flyby, revealing a geologically active dwarf planet. The mission, which also visited Arrokoth, faces potential termination due to proposed budget cuts, risking the loss of valuable scientific insights into the outer solar system.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which provided groundbreaking data on Pluto and beyond, faces potential shutdown due to proposed budget cuts by the White House, threatening to end its mission prematurely and lose valuable scientific data from the outer solar system.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft successfully demonstrated a new method of deep space navigation using stellar parallax, marking a significant advancement in interstellar exploration capabilities by accurately determining its position billions of miles from Earth, paving the way for future missions beyond our solar system.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft successfully demonstrated the first-ever deep space stellar navigation by using stellar parallax to determine its position relative to nearby stars, achieving an accuracy of about 4.1 million miles, marking a significant milestone in interstellar navigation technology.
The White House's proposed budget cuts threaten to terminate key NASA missions like New Horizons and Juno, potentially hindering U.S. leadership in space exploration and scientific discovery, according to experts who warn these cuts could set back planetary science and space innovation.
Researchers have simulated the conditions on the planetesimal Arrokoth and found that its red color likely comes from a surface rich in sugars formed by cosmic ray bombardment over 1.8 billion years. This discovery, made using data from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, suggests that similar processes on comets could have contributed to the origins of life on Earth.
A study led by planetary scientist Alan Stern has discovered significant amounts of complex organic molecules, including sugars, on Arrokoth, a distant object in the Kuiper Belt. This finding, made possible by the New Horizons mission's 2019 flyby, provides new insights into the chemical processes of the early solar system and potentially the origins of life on Earth.