A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
A Russian spacecraft that has been out of control since launching last week will fall back to Earth and burn up on Friday, scientists say. The unmanned cargo ship was launched from Kazakhstan last Tuesday, but contact was lost with it soon afterwards. The spacecraft, carrying three tonnes of equipment, will disintegrate as it enters Earth's atmosphere.
Any fragments to reach Earth should hit the sea and not land. The Progress M-27M was to deliver food, water, fuel, oxygen and clothing to the crew of six people on the International Space Station, that orbits about 420km (250 miles) above Earth. But after a communications failure, it began spiralling out of control.
Since then, it has been slowly descending, and orbiting Earth in a pattern that takes it over the eastern United States, Colombia, Brazil and Indonesia.Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, said on Wednesday it expected the spacecraft to "end its existence" between 01:23 and 11:55 Moscow time on Friday (22:23 GMT Thursday and 06:55 GMT Friday). It said: "Only a few small parts of elements of its construction could reach the surface of our planet."
Last week, Cathleen Lewis, a specialist in Russian space programmes at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, said: "The likelihood of it coming down and hitting someone is so remote as to be minuscule."
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