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 DSCOVR spacecraft, which was launched in February, has a camera that stares constantly at the sunlit face of the Earth. The images are being used to track moving features such as clouds and dust storms, and to monitor the climate. But on 27 September, it was in just the right position to see the Moon go behind the Earth and into its shadow. On the ground at this time, skywatchers would have observed the lunar body turn a shade of red. It does this because some sunlight is still able to reach the Moon's surface after being filtered through the Earth's atmosphere. "Our camera is normally centred on the Earth but we use the Moon for calibration," explained Jay Herman, the US space agency's (Nasa) lead investigator onDSCOVR's Epic camera system. "That's what we were doing on this occasion. We were staring at the Moon and the Earth moved in front about four hours before the eclipse was seen on Earth. And that's because we were at an an...