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 shuttle started a year-long information dump a weekend ago, permitting researchers to continue their examination of the distant world's interesting territories. The most recent arrangement of pictures incorporates what give off an impression of being hill components, cut valleys, but then more ice streams. Mission scientists got just a brief review of information quickly after the 14 July experience. The arrival of symbolism is currently basically steady. This implies the group will in future be discharging perspectives, and their translation of them, on a general basis.It guarantees to be completely intriguing, says vital agent Alan Stern. "Pluto is demonstrating to us a differing qualities of land forms and many-sided quality of procedures that adversary anything we've found in the close planetary system," the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) researcher said in an announcement. "On the off chance that a craftsman had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I presumably would have brought it over the top - however that is what is really there."
New Horizons procured a mass of perceptions when it shouted past
the 2,300 km-measurement planet two months prior, and a large portion of that data is still put away on load up.We got a few compressed pictures immediately after the flyby as a taster. But this was followed by something of a hiatus as the probe continued gathering science and concentrated on returning non-image data, such as counts of energetic particles and space dust. Now the mission has moved into a new phase, which involves the down link of the full, stored data-set, but without the earlier high compression. However, the vast distance to New Horizons’ current location – some 4.9 billion km away – means it will take until late in 2016 to get everything on the ground.An obvious highlight in the new image batch is the detection of a field of dark, aligned ridges, which look like wind-blown dunes.
Pluto’s atmosphere is considerably thinner than Earth’s, with a pressure at the surface about 10,000 times lower. How it can generate winds of sufficient force to move particles is a major puzzle. "Seeing dunes on Pluto - if that is what they are - would be completely wild, because Pluto’s atmosphere today is so thin," explained Bill McKinnon, a senior scientist on the mission from Washington University, St Louis. "Either Pluto had a thicker atmosphere in the past, or some process we haven’t figured out is at work. It’s a head-scratcher."
All the raw images from New Horizons LORRI camera are being posted online every Friday. This will include not just Pluto, but pictures of the dwarf's moons as well.Known as 2014 MU69, the less-than 45km-wide icy object is a billion and a half km beyond the orbit of Pluto. Course correction manoeuvres are needed in October and November to line up the probe for what would be another flyby. New Horizons would not get to 2014 MU69 until 2019.
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