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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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By BRIAN MELLEY

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Elon Musk has owned up to insulting a British spelunker in a rash tweet, but wouldn’t concede on the witness stand that he called the man a pedophile.

The Tesla CEO returns to the witness stand Wednesday after spending several hours at his defamation trial trying to dance around the meaning of the “pedo guy” tweet he aimed at Vernon Unsworth, a cave diver who helped rescue a dozen boys and their soccer coach from a flooded Thailand cave last year.

Musk said the insult meant only “creepy old man” and did not literally mean he was calling Unsworth a pedophile.

The spat began when Unsworth ridiculed Musk’s effort in the rescue by having engineers at his companies, including Space X and The Boring Co., develop a mini-submarine that could transport the boys to safety. Despite working around the clock to build the sub in short order, Musk arrived in Thailand late in the rescue effort and the craft was never used.

Unsworth called it nothing more than a “PR stunt” and said Musk could stick the sub “where it hurts.” Musk watched the CNN clip of Unsworth several times before lashing out in a series of tweets July 15, 2018.

“It was wrong and insulting, so I insulted him back,” the billionaire told a Los Angeles federal court jury. “It was an unprovoked attack on what was a good-natured attempt to help the kids.”

Unsworth is seeking unspecified damages for pain, suffering and emotional distress from the tech entrepreneur whose net worth exceeds $20 billion.

Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, said during opening statements that Unsworth deserves nothing for what he called “joking, taunting tweets in a fight between men.”

The shame and mortification Unsworth said he experienced is undercut by the attention he received after the rescue, Spiro said, including honors from the Thai king and British prime minister and offers from agents and film crews.

Musk, who was dressed in a charcoal gray suit and white shirt, remained composed on the witness stand during questioning from Unsworth’s lawyer, who called him as his first witness.

His answers were at times humorous and sometimes seemed like those of an executive under court order to be careful about what he says.

Musk is required to have his tweets about Tesla screened as part of court settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over allegations he posted misleading information about the company that caused wild stock swings.

His tweet about Unsworth caused Tesla’s stock to drop about 3% the following day, though it recovered a day later.

After company officials tried to get Musk to apologize for the tweet, he responded in an email that he didn’t want look “foolish and craven” by doing so right after the stock dropped.

Musk projected an air of humility as he was asked about his influence in the world. He said he didn’t think his efforts to address climate change were taken seriously, that few people were aware of his goal to colonize Mars and he didn’t really pay attention to how his fortune stacks up against other billionaires.

With his arms crossed, Musk at times squinted and stared off in the distance as he searched for answers to events that occurred more than a year ago.

He clashed at one point with attorney L. Lin Wood, telling him he interpreted the lawyer’s letter threatening to sue as a shakedown and extortion attempt.

“I get these shakedown letters a lot,” Musk said. “I think you’re looking for a significant payday.”

Spiro attempted to humanize Musk, having him discuss his family — sets of 15-year-old twins and 13-year-old triplets, all boys. Musk choked up talking about a son who died as a baby and when asked about his childhood in South Africa.

“It wasn’t good,” he said after a long pause.

Musk said he was asked to help with the cave rescue and decided to get involved when he heard a Thai Navy diver died in the cave system and that a monsoon was forecast that could drown the soccer team.

Musk received no compensation for his efforts, though he acknowledged his work could have been interpreted as a “narcissistic” publicity effort.

Musk deleted the July 15, 2018, tweets and apologized on Twitter, though subsequent statements he made have called into question what he meant.

Musk responded to a question on Twitter about whether he had accused Unsworth of being a pedophile by saying, “Bet ya a signed dollar it’s true.”

He told a Buzzfeed reporter seeking comment on the threat of a lawsuit by Unsworth to “stop defending child rapists,” followed by expletives.

Musk was asked about an almost comical attempt to dig up dirt on Unsworth when it became clear he could be sued.

One of his executives created a fake email account to communicate with a man who said he was an investigator, but then signed his own name on a nondisclosure agreement.

The investigator turned out to be a con man who was paid $52,000 and produced nothing damning about Unsworth.

Musk said he didn’t know Unsworth had helped with the rescue when he first tweeted about him and said “pedo guy” wasn’t asserted as a fact.

“Just as I didn’t literally mean he was a pedophile, I’m sure he didn’t literally mean shoving a sub up my ass,” Musk testified, provoking snickers.

When asked about the final line of his email to the Buzzfeed reporter that said he hoped Unsworth would sue him, Musk quipped: “I guess be careful what you wish for.”