Hubble has been in space 15 years
Washington The Hubble Space Telescope today celebrates 15 years of service as astronomy’s most renowned instrument.
The anniversary comes amid renewed hopes for the survival of Hubble, which has fans among scientists, legislators and amateur skywatchers. Without new batteries and stabilizing gyroscopes, the craft will fail after 2007, engineers predict.
NASA’s new chief, Michael Griffin, says he will reconsider a shuttle rescue mission that earlier had been ruled too risky.
NASA’s space shuttle Discovery set Hubble into orbit on April 25, 1990.
Wide meteor shower sparks calls to police
Boston A meteor shower Sunday night sparked a flurry of phone calls to police departments across New England from people who saw bright lights moving in the sky, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration said.
The meteor shower was seen as far north as Portland, Maine, and as far south as Long Island. Some witnesses mistook the meteor shower for a plane crashing in Connecticut, the FAA said.
The bright lights apparently came from the Lyrid meteor shower, expected to be visible to the naked eye between April 20 and April 25, officials said.
Sky diver dies after he hits plane
Deland, Fla. A sky-diving cinematographer died after his legs were severed in a midair collision with the airplane he’d jumped from, authorities said.
Albert Wing III deployed his parachute Saturday when he struck the left wing of the DHC-6 Twin Otter propeller plane at about 600 feet, a witness said.
Both of Wing’s legs were severed at the knees. He managed to maneuver his parachute and land near an airport about 40 miles north of Orlando. He was airlifted to a hospital, where he later died, authorities said.
Ex-Israeli President Ezer Weizman dies
Tel Aviv, Israel Former Israeli President Ezer Weizman, a flying ace who built up the nation’s air force and helped bring about Israel’s first peace treaty with an Arab country, died Sunday. He was 80.
Weizman, president from 1993 to 2000, suffered from respiratory infections in recent months.
During his political career, he made a highly public transition from hawk to dove, saying Jews had to learn to “share this part of the world” with the Arabs.
Weizman had pioneered contacts with Palestinian leaders.
Rescue crews work to free coal miners
Beijing Rescuers in northeast China worked Sunday to free 69 coal miners trapped in a flooded mine, the government said.
The miners were working underground at a mine run by the local government in Jiaohe, a city in Jilin province, about 600 miles northeast of Beijing, when the shaft flooded, media reported.
By Sunday afternoon, there still was no contact with the trapped miners.
Accidents in China’s coal mines kill thousands each year.
The government has repeatedly vowed to do more to crack down on safety violations, but explosions, floods, gas leaks, cave-ins and other disasters are reported nearly every week.
In the first three months of this year alone, 1,113 miners were killed — up 20.8 percent from the same period in 2004, government figures show.