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...
Europe's Lisa Pathfinder (LPF) probe is engaging in a series of experiments roughly 1.5 million km from Earth. The project has heightened interest, of course, because of the first sampling of the "cosmic ripples" made by ground-based detectors last September A successful demo for LPF would pave the way for a fully operational orbiting observatory in the 2030s. This would likely be known simply as Lisa - the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. "It's a wonderful time right now," said Paul McNamara, the European Space Agency's (Esa) project scientist on Lisa Pathfinder. "I've spent my entire career in this endeavour, and for years we were told - even ridiculed in some cases - that gravitational waves don't exist, or that we'd never find them. "Well, now we have found them, and we're about to take the next big, big step towards building a mission that could detect them in space.The Earth-bound laser interferometers sit...