VIRGINIA BEACH, Va., Aug. 22 (UPI) -- U.S. space officials said a suborbital rocket was destroyed by safety officials shortly after liftoff Friday morning from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility.

The rocket was destroyed by launch controllers because it failed to follow its planned path. No injuries or property damage were reported, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said in a release.

The Alliant Techsystems rocket was carrying two NASA hypersonic experiments. The Hypersonic Boundary Layer Transition experiment was designed to gather data on air flow conditions and heating on vehicles flying at hypersonic speeds. The Sub-Orbital Aerodynamic Re-entry Experiment was designed to evaluate a possible shape for a space capsule that could travel to Mars and gather data on atmospheric conditions encountered by the re-entering probes, NASA said.

Alliant Techsystems, also known as ATK, of Salt Lake City, is conducting the investigation of the rocket malfunction. NASA said it will consult with ATK and support the investigation.

The Norfolk (Va.) Virginian-Pilot said NASA lost $19 million of experiments and effort when the rocket was destroyed.

FDA approves irradiated lettuce

WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 (UPI) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it will allow the sale of fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce treated with radiation to kill bacteria.

The New York Times said it is the first time the U.S. government has allowed produce to be irradiated at levels high enough to kill E. coli and salmonella.

Critics have expressed concern that irradiation could lower nutritional value and create unsafe chemicals.

Dr. Laura Tarantino, director of the Office of Food Additive Safety at the FDA, told the newspaper the agency found no serious health or safety issues with irradiated spinach or lettuce.

"These irradiated foods are not less safe than others," Tarantino said, "and the doses are effective in reducing the level of disease-causing micro-organisms."

Food processors were already allowed to irradiate beef, eggs, poultry, oysters and spices, the newspaper said.

Second death in tainted deli meat probe

TORONTO, Aug. 22 (UPI) -- Canadian health officials have included a second death in their national probe of a listeriosis outbreak possibly linked to contaminated deli meat from Toronto.

David Williams, Ontario's chief medical officer of health, said Thursday he was working with federal officials to look into the source of the food-borne Listeria monocytogenes bacterium that sickened at least 16 people across the country, the Globe and Mail reported.

Also Thursday, a health official in Peterborough, Ontario, northeast of Toronto, said an elderly resident in a nursing home had died from listeriosis.

Last weekend, Maple Leaf Foods closed its Toronto processing plant and issued a recall for more than 20 brands of packaged cooked meats. Williams said it's likely that was the source of contamination but stressed more testing was needed and "there is no definitive link between the outbreak and the product at this time."

The Maple Leaf plant is being sanitized and staff is undergoing retraining before it reopens Monday, the report said. The plant supplies institutions such as hospitals, nursing homes and McDonalds with packaged cooked meats.

Details of anthrax investigation revealed

WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 (UPI) -- A team of U.S. scientists spent nearly seven years working in secret to help crack the 2001 anthrax letter case, the FBI said.

Federal investigators asked scientists from a number of research institutions, including Sandia National Laboratories, to help in the investigation of letters containing bacillus anthracis that were mailed in 2001 to several media organizations and two Democratic U.S. senators -- Tom Daschle of North Dakota and Pat Leahy of Vermont. Five people were killed and 17 people were injured.

Sandia said research by the lab demonstrated to the FBI that the form of bacillus anthracis contained in those letters was not a weaponized form. Investigator Joseph Michael said the information was crucial in ruling out state-sponsored terrorism.

Michael, Paul Kotula and roughly a dozen other researchers examined more than 200 samples over six and one-half years, Sandia said Thursday in a release.

"Sandia's work was the first to actually link the spore material in the New York Post, the Daschle and the Leahy letters," the release said. "The elemental signatures and the locations of these signatures, while not indicating intentional weaponization, did show that the spores were indistinguishable and therefore likely came from the same source. That conclusion was corroborated a few years later by the DNA studies."