Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label planet

Solar plane lands in New York City

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Planet Nine's profile fleshed out

In January, researchers at Caltech in the US suggested a large, additional planet might be lurking in the icy outer reaches of the Solar System.  Now, a team at the University of Bern in Switzerland has worked out what they say are upper and lower limits on how big, bright and cold it might be.  The study has been accepted by the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.  Prof Mike Brown and Dr Konstantin Batygin made their case for the existence of a ninth planet in our Solar System orbiting far beyond even the dwarf world Pluto.  There are no direct observations of this much bigger object yet, but a search is now underway using the world's largest telescopes. The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) scientists based their findings on the way other far-flung objects are seen to move.  This prompted the Bern team, Prof Christoph Mordasini and Esther Linder, to use computer simulations to work out basic characteristics for the hypothetical ninth planet...
Post a Comment
Read more

Scientists drill a hole into the Indian Ocean floor to try to get below the Earth's crust for the first time

They want to sample rock from the planet's mantle - its deep interior.  In the process, the researchers hope to check their assumptions about the materials from which the crust itself is made.  It will probably take several years to drop the full 5 to 5.5km, says co-team leader, Prof Chris MacLeod. But Prof MacLeod suspects the discontinuity could also describe in places the depth to which water has managed to penetrate into the peridotites to produce a different type of rock known as serpentinite.  This is in addition to the 700m of water between the drilling ship, the Joides Resolution (JR), and the seabed. "In total, we think it will take three expeditions," the Cardiff University geologist told.  "The science is approved and we have funding for this initial two-month investigation. But we will need to come back and we may not complete the task until the 2020s."  There have been several attempts to drill into the mantle, but none has yet succeede...
Post a Comment
Read more

The total amount of groundwater on the planet is estimated to be 23 million cubic km

If this volume is hard to visualise, imagine the Earth's entire land surface covered in a layer some 180m deep.  The new calculation comes from a Canadian-led team and is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.  Significantly, little of this water - just 6% - is the kind of bankable resource that is most useful to people.  That small fraction is referred to as "modern" groundwater: it is extractable because it is near the surface, and can be used to supplement above-ground resources in rivers and lakes.  It's the groundwater that is the most quickly renewed - on the scale of human lifetimes," explained study leader Tom Gleeson from the University of Victoria.  And yet this modern groundwater is also the most sensitive to climate change and to human contamination. So, it's a vital resource that we need to manage better."To quantify just how much water is stored in the top 2km of the Earth's surface, Dr Gleeson's team had to combine larg...
Post a Comment
Read more

Total lunar eclipse to meet supermoon

The Moon will turn a rusty hue in the early hours of Monday and may seem larger in the sky.  The event is caused by a total lunar eclipse coinciding with another astronomical event called a supermoon.  It's the second total lunar eclipse this year, but the first since 2008 where the whole eclipse will be visible from the UK.  The entire eclipse will be visible from eastern North America, South America, West Africa and western Europe.  Skywatchers in the western half of North America, the rest of Europe and Africa, the Middle East and South Asia will see a partial one.  From the UK, observers will see the Moon pass through the Earth's shadow in the early hours of Monday morning. In North and South America the eclipse will be seen on Sunday evening. The last time a total lunar eclipse was visible in its entirety from the UK was 2008; the next time one will be visible after this is in 2019 The supermoon, where Earth's satellite is near its minimum distan...
Post a Comment
Read more