News Brief Feb. 24-28

International

On Wednesday, a Royal Caribbean cruise line ship rescued 11 refugees adrift in the Gulf of Mexico.

A cruiseliner named Brilliance of the Seas departed from New Orleans on Saturday for a seven day cruise. On Wednesday, the crew spotted a small vessel that appeared to be in distress.

“The captain calls me immediately as the charterer of the ship to let me know that they are going to turn around and investigate, and that’s exactly what they did,” Randle Roper, CEO of VACAYA, the company that chartered the ship, told CNN. “They sent a pilot boat with Brilliance of the Seas crew members out to the stranded vessel.”

The crew safely retrieved the 11 passengers stranded on the lost boat.

“I can only imagine the fear that they must have been feeling to be out in the open Gulf with no other vessels around,” Roper said. “The refugees on the boat were literally bailing out the water out of the boat, so their boat had clearly become stricken, and they were just adrift at sea and taking on water.”

Guests aboard Brilliance of the Seas gathered on the decks to witness the rescue.

The U.S. Coast Guard helped to determine the next steps for the refugees. They safely disembarked in Mexico on Thursday.

National

Houston-based company Intuitive Machines launched their second robotic lander aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday.

The nine first stage engines fired at 7:16 p.m., propelling the rocket off of pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. Two minutes later, the first stage fell off, and after less than six more minutes the upper stage dropped, setting the payload on course for the moon.

Everything went according to plan, so the Athena lander is expected to touch down on the flat structure known as Mons Mouton on March 6, 100 miles from the south pole (closer than any craft has ever attempted).

“Every time you go, it’s a roll-the-dice thing. I think we have higher confidence, but we’re also having a much more complicated mission this time,” CEO Steve Altemus told CBS. “This time we’re flying with a deployable drill. We’re flying with a deployable rover, we’re flying with a drone, a rocket-powered drone that hops, flies off the lander and hops along the surface and down into a permanently shadowed crater. All those deployments and surface operations are new, and we’re going to learn when we do those.”

Athena’s Trident drill and mass spectrometer will take readings from cold soil at the landing zone in search of ice deposits.

The discovery of ice on the moon would provide future astronauts with a source of drinking water, air, and even rocket fuel.

In addition to its own probes, Athena carries a variety of other crafts created by other companies such as Yaoki, a microrover developed by Tokyo-based Dymo Co. to photograph the lunar surface.

“These are the initial highways or trails that open up a whole new region of exploration of the moon,” Altemus said. “Like the United States when it was very young, go west, right? This is like that. Just like that.”

Local

Oklahoma City Leaders announced an update to the Bricktown Canal on Thursday involving nanobubble technology.

Five Moleaer nanobubble generators will be installed over the weekend to release microscopic oxygen bubbles which will sink to the bottom of the canal, improving cleanliness, smell, and water clarity.

“With the nanobubbles, we’ll be able to keep the water cleaner,” Scott Copelin, manager of natural resources for Oklahoma City Parks & Recreation, told KFOR. “We want to take good care of our public facilities, and this is a creative solution to improve the maintenance of one of Oklahoma City’s most iconic attractions.”

As of now, the canal is drained and cleaned around every five years.

“Our team does a great job of keeping the canal clean and skimming as much of the leaves and debris as possible, but algae is still a problem,” Copelin said. “We also ask residents and visitors to help us keep the canal healthy by keeping trash out of the water.”