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...
Stardust visited Comet Wild 2 in 2004, catching samples from its dusty tail in specially made slabs of "aerogel". By studying the tracks with microscopes and synchrotron X-rays, researchers aim to reconstruct exactly what kind of particles first hit the gel. They are also identifying extra, tiny grains to be extracted and tested. "We want to tell people where the interesting grains are," said Amanda White, a student working on the project at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.She presented her work this week at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Florida. Most work on Stardust samples to date has selected the grains using regular optical images, concentrating on the relatively large particles that burrowed their way right into the foam. But when the dust first slammed into the gel at 6km/s (13,421mph) it carved out complex shapes, often resembling a teardrop, with a large bulb near the entry point that gradually n...