Our Little Green Planet: fly around the world on solar power

fly around the world on solar power

Posted on April 7th, 2010 by admin

Are you the traveling type that always wanted to visit various places around the world? Would you be adventurous enough to do it on a balloon? No? Ok, would you be GREEN enough to do it with power from 12,000 solar cells? “YES!” is what we’re looking. The famous adventurer Bertrand Piccard is at it again, only this time he’s planning to go around the world by flying something called the Solar Impulse. A worthy prototype of the Solar Impulse took off on its first test flight today form a field in Payerne, Switzerland, and flew for approximately 1.5 hours. The plane has a wingspan the size of that from a 747 (a brisk run to the 70 yard line of your local football field should give you an idea of the length), and weighs 3,500 lbs (think toyota camry, with perfectly fine accelerator pedals). The prototype took off at a speed of 28mph with the help of four 10HP propeller motors (power of a small motor boat). Here’s a video clip from the Associated Press, enjoy! BBC also has some nice video footage here.

Scroll back up and take a closer look at that Solar Impulse and Wright Flyer picture for a second… that’s 106 years of innovation, haven’t we come a long way? I don’t know about you, but I’m still waiting for my flying car!

Tags: bertrand piccard, fly around the world, solar plane

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at 11:12 pm and is filed under Featured Content, Green Technology, Solar Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.