世界上首架可实现昼夜飞行的太阳能飞机——“阳光动力”号本周三在瑞士首都伯尔尼附近的一座军用机场成功完成首次试飞。此次试飞持续了87分钟，最高飞行高度达到了1200米。

The Solar Impulse, which has 12,000 solar cells built into its wings, is a prototype for an aircraft intended to fly around the world without fuel in 2012.

A solar-powered airplane designed to fly day and night without fuel or emissions¹（排放物，辐射） successfully made its first test flight above the Swiss countryside on Wednesday.

The Solar Impulse, which has 12,000 solar cells built into its wings, is a prototype（原型，标准） for an aircraft intended to fly around the world without fuel in 2012.

It glided²（滑翔） for 87 minutes above western Switzerland at an altitude of 1,200 meters (3,937 feet) with German test pilot Markus Scherdel at the controls.

"Everything went as it should," Scherdel told Reuters Television at Payerne military base after landing.

It took six years to build the carbon fiber³（碳化纤维） aircraft, which has the wingspan（翼展） of an Airbus A340 and weighs as much as a mid-size car (1,600 kg).

The prototype made a "flea⁴ hop⁵" in December 2009, flying a distance of 350 meters one meter above the runway of a military airbase near Zurich. It was then transported to Payerne airfield⁶ in the west of Switzerland for its maiden⁷ flight.

The propeller⁸（推进器，螺旋桨） plane is powered by four electric motors and designed to fly day and night by saving energy from its solar cells in high-performance batteries.

It is ultimately expected to attain⁹ an average flying speed of 70 km per hour and reach a maximum altitude（高度） of 8,500 meters (27,900 feet).

Bertrand Piccard, one of the Swiss pilots behind the project, is best known for completing the first non-stop, round-the-world flight in a hot-air balloon in March 1999.

The other main pilot, Swiss engineer Andre Borschberg, has described it as "ten times lighter¹⁰ than the very best glider¹¹（滑翔机） ."

"Such a large wingspan for so little weight is something completely new in the world of aviation（航空，飞行术） ," he said on the initiative's website www.solarimpulse.com.

The project's budget is 100 million Swiss francs ($94 million), 80 million francs of which has been secured from sponsors, according to spokeswoman Rachel de Bros.

Belgian chemicals company Solvay, Swiss watchmaker Omega, part of the Swatch group, and German banking¹² giant Deutsche Bank, are the three main sponsors.

Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), one of two Swiss federal polytechnical universities（工业大学） , is scientific advisor¹³.