Solar-powered drone has completed a successful test flight
Jan. 11, 2017 H.W.Fu Ming
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company's solar-powered drone has completed a successful test flight.
Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook page that the 'Aquila' flew at a high altitude for 96 minutes in Yuma, Arizona.
Aquila is Facebook's first step in sending a fleet of drones that can fly for at least three months and create communication networks to deliver internet access.
The company's chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer says they will build on Aquila's success to achieve their ultimate goal.
"The idea of this is to loiter around an area at very high altitude, 60 to 90 thousand feet in the air, stand on station for months at a time and beam down backbone internet access. From this photo it's hard to get a sense of scale and this is an early prototype for testing out the aerodynamics. To give you a sense of the scale of this thing, this is us actually constructing the full scale version.
Aquila will go through several more test flights. Facebook hopes it will soon break the world record for the longest solar-powered unmanned aircraft flight, which currently stands at two weeks.
You may think your personal computer is fast if it can boot itself up within a few seconds. But that is nothing compared to China’s new supercomputing system, Sunway TaihuLight.
The massive machine in Wuxi,Jiangsu province, is capable of performing quadrillions of calculations per second. With that processing capacity, it has grabbed the top spot in the rankings of the world’s 500 fastest scientific computers, compiled biannually by the TOP 500 organization.
The former NO1was China’s Tianhe-2, which now ranks second before the US’Titan.
According to the Wall STREET Journal, TaihuLight is built entirely with China-made chips.”China has bolstered its claim to leadership in the highest reaches of computing,” wrote Wall Street Journal re porters Don Clark and Eva Dou.
Just 15 years ago, China claimed zero of the World’s 500 fastest supercomputers, But now, it has more of the machines on the top 500 list than any other country, including the US.