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...
Nasa's New Horizons rocket has another focus to go for taking after its notable flyby of Pluto. It is called 2014 MU69, and was one of two comet-like protests that were under thought by researchers chipping away at the mission. The US space office will now complete an audit of the arrangement before formally favoring the mission's expansion. New Horizons completed its flyby of Pluto in July, drawing nearer to 12,500km from the diminutive person planet's surface. The shuttle caught nitty gritty pictures and other information of Pluto, as well as of its moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra. The new target speaks the truth a billion and a half km past Pluto. It speaks the truth 45km crosswise over and is thought to be one of the building squares from which greater universes, for example, Pluto are framed.
Such questions shape a locale of the external Solar System called
the Kuiper Belt, containing a profound stop test of what our inestimable neighborhood was similar to when it framed 4.6 billion years back. "Even as the New Horizon's spacecraft speeds away from Pluto out into the Kuiper Belt, and the data from the exciting encounter with this new world is being streamed back to Earth, we are looking outward to the next destination for this intrepid explorer," said John Grunsfeld, head of Nasa's Science Mission Directorate.We expect it to be much less expensive than the prime mission, while still providing new and exciting science. The spacecraft carries enough hydrazine fuel for another flyby, and scientists say it could continue operating into the late 2020s or beyond.
The mission's principal investigator, Alan Stern, called Nasa's selection of 2014 MU69 "a great choice". He added: "This KBO costs less fuel to reach [than other candidate targets], leaving more fuel for the flyby, for ancillary science, and greater fuel reserves to protect against the unforeseen." In summer 2014, the Hubble Space Telescope was used to discover five icy objects, later narrowed to two, within New Horizons' flight path.
In late October and early November, the spacecraft will perform a series of engine burns to set its course toward 2014 MU69 ahead of an encounter currently set for 1 January 2019.
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