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...
The US space organization test caught the most recent picture on Tuesday when it was just shy of eight million km from the diminutive person world. As of Thursday, New Horizons had moved to inside of six million km, heading for its memorable flyby one week from now. The new picture was the first to be returned after the PC hiccup at the weekend that saw the test quickly drop interchanges with Earth. The substance of Pluto found in the picture is extensively that which will be analyzed in point of interest on 14 July.
It incorporates a huge dim locale close to Pluto's equator, named "the whale", and a generally heart-molded splendid region traversing 2,000km. At closest approach, New Horizons will be about 12,500km above the surface.
Its high-resolution camera Lorri should then be able to discern features at a resolution better than 100m per pixel.
Lorri is responsible for the view seen on this page, too, but the colour information has been overlaid from the probe's other camera, Ralph. "They're still a little blurry but they're by far the best pictures we've ever seen of Pluto, and they're only going to get better," said John Spencer from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado, US, one of the New Horizons co-investigators.
Right now they're just showing us that Pluto is really weird. It's got some extremely dark areas, some extremely bright areas, and we don't know what any of them are yet," Dr Spencer told. He and his colleagues believe the brightest patch might be covered in frozen carbon monoxide, while the dark swathe may be a deposit of hydrocarbons, burnt out of Pluto's atmosphere by UV light and cosmic rays.But this is all guesswork at the moment. "We will get pictures 500 times better than this next Tuesday, when we have our closest approach," Dr Spencer said.
When it arrives at the dwarf planet, New Horizons will be travelling at almost 14km/s - far too fast to go into orbit. Instead, it will execute an automated, pre-planned reconnaissance, grabbing as many pictures and other data as it can as it barrels past the 2,300km-wide dwarf and its five known moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra.The flyby occurs on the 50th anniversary of the first successful American pass of Mars by the Mariner 4 spacecraft.
By way of comparison, New Horizons will gather 5,000 times as much data at Pluto than Mariner did at the Red Planet. New Horizons' difficulty is getting all that information back to Earth. The distance to Pluto is vast - more than 4.5 billion km - and this makes for very low bit rates. It will take 16 months to send back all the science acquired over the coming days.
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