Officials with Europe’s ESA space agency are rightfully excited, as their 10-year long Rosetta mission to rendezvous with a comet is literally getting closer to completion.
On Wednesday, the ESA released close-up photos of comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko… well, lets just call it “Comet 67P,” which is barreling towards the sun at over 34,000 miles an hour. You’d think getting amazing shots of the comet would be enough, but no, there’s more. Come November, a small probe will detach from Rosetta and actually land on the comet, which is about 2 miles wide. Now that’s rocket science.
Rosetta will hover around the comet as it sweeps around the sun, and don’t worry, it’s not coming anywhere near Earth.
Just two months ago, National Parks officials in the U.S. banned the use of drones inside park boundaries, much to the hue and cry of wannabe aviators, who said the restriction was unfair to their hobby.
Seems like the ban was a good call after all because on Thursday, some tourist splashed down his quadcopter in the Great Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park. We don’t have video of the crash because it’s still on the drone, which is at the bottom of the 121-foot deep spring, where the water temperature is somewhere close to that of Satan’s hot tub.
Park officials are now worried that microbes on the sunken drone could muck up the bacteria in the spring, which gives the roiling tourist attraction its famous color palette. Maybe they can use a drone submarine to get it out.
If you own a 1,200 horsepower Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, it’s probably a given you can’t drive 55 given a straight stretch of road. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.
But for this supercar to really stretch its legs, you need a lot of straight road, and that’s just what the organizers of the Sun Valley Road Rally arranged recently. They closed off a lovely stretch of Highway 75 in Idaho and let drivers put the pedal down on their supercars, and the Bugatti dialed up a sizzling 246 miles an hour. It sounded more like a fighter jet than a car as it blew by at speed.
That 246 mile an hour rip is actually below the car’s even more ludicrous 269 mph top speed, but it’s impressive none the less. So, hey, McLaren, Hennessy, Koenigsegg, Lamborghini and all the rest: hopefully we’ll see you next year… in Idaho.
Your host today is DT Automotive Editor Nick Jaynes. Miss an episode of DT Daily? Catch up on all the latest tech tidbits right here.
