Images indicate Mars probe crashed
BERLIN — Europe’s experimental Mars probe hit the right spot — but at the wrong speed — and may have ended up in a fiery ball of rocket fuel when it struck the surface, scientists said Friday.
Pictures taken by a NASA satellite show a black spot in the area where the Schiaparelli lander was meant to touch down Wednesday, the European Space Agency said. The images end two days of speculation after the probe’s unexpected radio silence less than a minute before the planned landing.
“Estimates are that Schiaparelli dropped from a height of between 2 and 4 kilometers [about 1.2 to 2.4 miles], therefore impacting at a considerable speed, greater than 300 kilometers per hour [186 mph],” the agency said.
It said the large disturbance captured in the NASA photographs may have been caused by the probe’s steep plunge to impact, which would have sprayed matter around like a blast site on Earth.
Schiaparelli was designed to test technology for a more ambitious European Mars landing in 2020. The European Space Agency said the probe’s mother ship was successfully placed into orbit Wednesday and will soon begin analyzing the Martian atmosphere in search for evidence of life.
Ex-police chief held in 43’s vanishing
MEXICO CITY — The former police chief of Iguala, where 43 students disappeared in 2014, was detained Friday after two years at large, in a development that Mexican authorities and relatives of the disappeared hope could shed new light on the case.
The National Security Commission announced that federal agents arrested 58-year-old Felipe Flores in Iguala, in the southern state of Guerrero, in a raid in which no shots were fired.
Flores was arrested at 6:30 a.m. leaving a house where he had visited his wife, said Commissioner Renato Sales.
Flores is accused of offenses including organized crime and kidnapping the students, who had been on their way to a protest march in Mexico City. He is alleged to have followed the then-mayor’s order to attack the students and then tried to cover up the role of Iguala police in the disappearances.
“The investigations indicate that this person was one of the people responsible for coordinating the operation that turned into the aggression against the students,” Sales said at an afternoon news conference.
The students, from the teacher’s college at Ayotzinapa, were taken by police in Iguala on Sept. 26, 2014, and have not been heard from since.
Authorities have now arrested 131 people, mostly police officers and alleged cartel members, in connection with the disappearances.
London subway package leads to arrest
LONDON — British police arrested a 19-year-old man Friday on suspicion of a terrorism offense over a suspicious package discovered on a London subway train.
The Metropolitan Police force said officers used a stun gun while detaining the man at midday Friday on a busy city street. Specialist firearms officers were deployed for the arrest but did not fire their weapons.
The man is being held at a London police station on suspicion of “the commission, preparation and instigation of terrorism acts.”
North Greenwich subway station on the Underground’s Jubilee Line was closed for several hours Thursday after the discovery of what police called a “suspicious item” on a train.
The object was destroyed in a controlled explosion. Police say they await the results of a forensic examination to discover what it contained.
53 killed in Cameroon train derailment
ESEKA, Cameroon — An overloaded train derailed along the route that links Cameroon’s two major cities on Friday, killing at least 53 people and injuring more than 300, the government said.
The injured could not be evacuated until rail travel is re-established, said government spokesman Issa Tchiroma, adding that the death toll is likely to rise.
The train, which derailed about 75 miles west of the capital, Yaounde, on the way to port city of Douala, had been carrying 1,300 passengers instead of the usual 600, rail officials told state radio. The accident came as heavy rains have caused landslides along roads in the region.