ST. CLOUD, Minn. (AP) — Three soldiers from the Minnesota National Guard were killed Thursday when the Black Hawk helicopter they were riding in for a routine maintenance test flight crashed in a farm field in central Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz confirmed.

The identities of the soldiers were not immediately released, pending notification of family.

The crash was being investigated and preliminary information on the cause was not released.

“My heart breaks for the families, the friends and fellow soldiers,” Walz said at a news conference. “The coming days will be dark and difficult.” He said Minnesota stands ready to assist the families of the soldiers who were killed.

Maj. Gen. Jon Jensen, the adjutant general of the Minnesota National Guard, said in a tweet: “Our Minnesota National Guard family is devastated by the deaths of these soldiers. Our priority right now is ensuring that our families are taken care of.”

The National Guard said the helicopter was a UH-60 Black Hawk from the guard’s Army Aviation Safety Facility in St. Cloud.

The Guard lost contact with the helicopter shortly after it took off on a maintenance test flight from St. Cloud on Thursday afternoon, Guard Master Sgt. Blair Heusdens said. The helicopter called mayday about nine minutes after takeoff.

Stearns County Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Dan Miller told reporters that the mayday call came in at about 2:15 p.m. Crews from multiple departments spent several hours searching before finding the crash, Miller said.

The Minnesota State Patrol was called to bring in a helicopter to help with the search. A State Patrol Cirrus aircraft, equipped with thermal imaging cameras, also helped in the search.

Television aerial footage showed the wreck of the helicopter along a tree line near open fields near St. Cloud, a city about 59 miles (95 kilometers) northwest of Minneapolis. Apparent scorch marks encircled the flattened wreckage in the snow.

Dave Tannehill, a flight instructor in St. Cloud, was among those who took to the air to help search for the missing helicopter. He told the Star Tribune that he brought a couple people with him to help look.

“We were hoping to find a helicopter sitting in the middle of a field with a couple guys standing next to it looking for a ride. But not lucky enough to find that,” he said. Tannehill said he was in the air for about 90 minutes and circled the area, along with a military plane and police aircraft.

“It was bad news for everyone, and it was a quiet flight back,” Tannehill said.

The Guard’s base near St. Cloud Regional Airport has been in operation since 2009, with Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters maintained there.

Walz served for 24 years in the Army National Guard, while he was a schoolteacher and coach, but retired in 2005 to run for Congress. He canceled a tree-lighting ceremony Thursday and went to the area near the crash site.

He tweeted Thursday night that he was in Kimball with the brave National Guard service members. His office said he would be in continuous contact with the National Guard throughout the day Friday.

By MARCIA DUNN

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s sun-skimming spacecraft, the Parker Solar Probe, is surprising scientists with its unprecedented close views of our star.

Scientists released the first results from the mission Wednesday. They observed bursts of energetic particles never seen before on such a small scale as well as switchback-like reversals in the out-flowing solar magnetic field that seem to whip up the solar wind.

NASA’s Nicola Fox compared this unexpected switchback phenomenon to the cracking of a whip.

“They’re striking and it’s hard to not think that they’re somehow important in the whole problem,” said Stuart Bale of the University of California, Berkeley, who was part of the team.

Researchers said they also finally have evidence of a dust-free zone encircling the sun. Farther out, there’s so much dust from vaporizing comets and asteroids that one of 80 small viewfinders on one instrument was pierced by a grain earlier this year.

“I can’t say that we don’t worry about the spacecraft. I mean, the spacecraft is going through an environment that we’ve never been before,” Fox said.

Launched in 2018, Parker has come within 15 million miles (25 million kilometers) of the sun and will get increasingly closer — within 4 million miles (6 million kilometers) — over the next six years. It’s completed three of 24 orbits of the sun, dipping well into the corona, or upper atmosphere. The goal of the mission is to shed light on some of the mysteries surrounding the sun.

Parker will sweep past Venus on Dec. 26 for the second gravity-assist of the $1.5 billion mission and make its fourth close solar encounter in January.

The findings in the journal Nature were made during a relatively quiet phase of solar activity.

“We’re just starting to scratch the surface of this fascinating physics,” said Princeton University’s David McComas, the chief scientist of one of the spacecraft’s instruments.

As Parker gets even closer to its target, the sun will go through an active phase “so we can expect even more exciting results soon,” University College London’s Daniel Verscharen wrote in an accompanying editorial. Verscharen was not part of the mission.

Over the summer, Fox shared these early results with solar astrophysicist Eugene Parker, 92, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago for whom the spacecraft is named. He expressed excitement — “wow” — and was keen to be involved.

It’s the first NASA spacecraft to be named after a person still alive. Parker attended its launch last year from Cape Canaveral.

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