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...
UK astronaut Tim Peake has performed a challenging remote control experiment on the International Space Station
He had to command a robot rover on Earth, driving it across a big sandpit in Stevenage, near London, that simulated the surface of Mars. The Briton experienced some software glitches, but achieved his objectives. These involved finding a series of painted targets in a darkened room that had been set up to represent a cave on the Red Planet. It was all part of a European Space Agency (Esa) project which aims to learn how astronauts can control remote systems on other worlds. Known as Meteron (Multi-Purpose End-To-End Robotic Operation Network), the programme has already seen Danish ISS crewman Andreas Mogensen get a robot on Earth to precisely place some pegs in a set of holes . But Major Tim's job, which got under way at 15:00 BST (14:00 GMT), took things up a notch in terms of complexity.One of his big obstacles was time. His control link had to transmit down to Earth, bounce through numerous communications nodes, before reaching the robot in its simulatio...