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...
Wright Mons on Pluto They are seen in images returned from the New Horizons probe, which flew past the distant dwarf planet in July. The mountains are several km high and tens of km across, and each has what appears to be a depression in the top. Unlike Earth volcanoes that spew molten rock, Pluto's volcanoes - if that is what they are - would likely erupt an icy slush of substances such as water, nitrogen, ammonia or methane. The suggestion was raised at the 47th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences, where the mission team is presenting over 50 research reports from the flyby. The scientists still need to do further work to confirm their volcano idea. What would help in particular is information on the composition of the materials making up the local terrain. "If we can constrain the compositions of these features then we'd have something to work with, with respect to modelling how t...