CARL AZUZ, CNN 10 ANCHOR: I`m Carl Azuz for CNN 10. Good to see you this Thursday and thank you for taking a few minutes to get up to speed on world events.

People in southeast China are measuring the scope of the damage caused by a powerful typhoon that hit yesterday morning. It was called typhoon Hato.

It brought powerful winds and flooding to this region and several deaths were blamed in the storm.

One thing unique about it was that Hato wasn`t initially very powerful as it moved toward Hong Kong. It was about the equivalent of an average tropical storm. But that changed in just 24 hours before it made landfall. Hato`s wind speeds nearly doubled in that time before the storm crashed

into the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau.

A local weather service said it was the strongest storm to hit the area in five years. Hato`s maximum wind speeds were around 108 miles per hour, which is almost the strength of a category three hurricane. It made landfall during high tide, bringing large waves, flooding and damage to the coast. Schools, businesses and the stock market were closed.

And then as Hato moved west over China, it passed over a densely populated area, more than 60 million people were in the path of the system. The threat wasn`t as great inland though tough. Typhoons like hurricanes are fueled by war water and they general lose their strength as they pass over land.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Typhoons are hurricanes are cyclones. They are the same thing, just in different oceans.

A lot like a hot cake is a flat jack is a pancake is a short stack. If you are west of the dateline, so west of Hawaii, north of equator, you`re a typhoon. If you`re in the Atlantic or the Pacific, around America, you are a hurricane. And if you are around the Indian Ocean or in the southern hemisphere, you`re a cyclone.

So, it`s not out of the question for a hurricane to become a typhoon if it moves over the dateline. In fact, after crossing the international dateline, Hurricane Genevieve turned into Typhoon Genevieve a few years ago.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AZUZ (voice-over): Ten-second trivia: Which of these constellations is also known as "the Hunter"?

The Pleiades, Orion, Taurus, or Hercules?

One of the most recognizable constellations in the night sky, Orion, is also known as the Hunter.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AZUZ: And NASA is hoping to use its new Orion spacecraft to hunt new territory in deep space. The contractor building it says the latest version of Orion was turned on for the first time this week. It was an important milestone for the program. NASA has been working on Orion since 2011 and it`s had its share of setbacks, an unmanned test flight of the craft that had been planned for November was pushed back until at least 2019 because of concerns about safety, technical issues and high costs.

NASA spent almost $14 billion on Orion. That doesn`t include the addition billion it spent on developing the rocket that could get Orion out of this world. Still, the spacecraft is expected to have a lot of capability.

And CNN`s Rachel Crane was able to take a seat inside.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RACHEL CRANE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): NASA`s new heavy lift rocket --

ANNOUNCER: The dawn of Orion and a new era of American space exploration - -

CRANE: Together with the spacecraft Orion, which will go on top of the rocket, humans could explore our solar system deeper than ever before.

(on camera): There`s only two of us right now in here --

MARK GEYER, NASA DEPUTY DIRECTOR: Yes.

CRANE: -- and you`re saying the thing could it up to six.

(voice-over): And we got an inside look at what that new spacecraft looks like.

(on camera): Could we even survive 21 days just the two of us inside of --

GEYER: Yes, it would be a wild, yes.

CRANE (voice-over): Orion will take up to six astronauts into deep space for 21 days.

(on camera): Is there any way we can get inside these chairs here, you think?

GEYER: Yes.

CRANE: How was Orion outfitted to get us to deep space?

GEYER: State of the art heat shields to protect the crew on entry, parachute systems, a very lightweight system, so Orion is, you know, over 40 percent composites, which means it`s light.

One of the things special about Orion is the size. So, four people in 21 days gives you a lot of capability whether it`s exploring an asteroid or on the surface of a planet.

CRANE: And why 21 days?

GEYER: Well, 21 days -- it gets you really into this high orbits around the moon, which allows you to either do missions at the moon or do transfers on to asteroids around the Mars. So, it`s about the right duration.

CRANE (voice-over): For a journey to Mars, the crew would have to transfer from Orion to a larger habitat.

GEYER: If you`re going to go to Mars, which is somewhere up to a year and a half to three-year mission, you need more volume.

CRANE (on camera): Right.

GEYER: You need bigger head module, more food.

CRANE (voice-over): Orion still doesn`t have an exact destination. But whether it`s the moon or Mars, it`s going to take a powerful rocket to get it out there.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AZUZ: Next, plastics. They`re lightweight, many are strong. They`re easy to make. They`re used in everything from cars to construction to electronics. The screen you`re watching this one is probably surrounded by plastic. But if they`re not recycled, it can take hundreds of years for plastics to decompose in the environment, and that`s a growing problem especially at sea.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LYNDA KINKADE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The South Pacific Ocean, a vast marine landscape of precious part of our Earth.

But take a closer look and scientists say it`s becoming a plastic garbage junk.

CAPT. CHARLES MOORE, ALGALITA MARINE RESEARCH AND EDUCATION: Here I am standing on Hi-Zex Buoy Island.

KINKADE: Meet Captain Charles Moore, founder of Algalita Marine Research and Education, a non-profit group dedicated to solving the sea`s plastic pollution problem.

In 1997, Captain Moore discovered a massive garbage patch in the North Pacific. Now, his team has confirmed the existence of another further south of the coast of Chile and Peru, Captain Moore estimated to be about 2 million square kilometers, larger than Mexico.

Here`s how it formed. Winds around a persistent high pressure system drive ocean currents, creating a vortex, known as a gyre, causing debris to collect in a central location.

MOORE: I call it a plastic soup. If you think of the ocean as the liquid and a soup, we`ve gone from, you know, creamy to extra junkie.

KINKADE: Captain Moore and his team spent months trolling the south Pacific collecting samples from large objects to plastic the size of a grain of rice.

MOORE: The surface waters are where we see the debris and it is mostly particulate, that the size that`s most common is between one and three millimeters in diameter. We find interesting objects, a lot of tubs that are used in sorting fish in the fisheries that are manufactured in New Zealand. We found a lot of fishing buoys. And, of course, the most common things that we find out there are the floating bottles and the bottle caps.

KINKADE: The plastic poses a major threat to marine life. Small lantern fish come to the surface at night to feed on plankton. Many eat small microplastics instead and are then unable to swim back to the bottom. The plastic acting like a buoy.

Not only do these fish ingest chemicals from the plastic, but so the larger fish who eat them.

Algalita Marine Research found 35 percent of lantern fish in the previously discovered North Pacific garbage patch are eating plastic. The researchers are now sifting through the samples to try to get a better understanding of what types of plastic they`ve collected. But Captain Moore says it`s our throwaway society that needs to change.

MOORE: We have to fear plastic for not only to what it does to the marine environment, but what it`s doing to us. We need to fear it and we need to respect it because it is being treated like waste, like thrash, it`s just this buffer that you throw away. And we`ve got to have a new attitude about that, in which we realize that plastics have an afterlife. It must be reincarnated. It must be part of a circular economy, or it`s going to end up in the ocean and destroy marine life.

So, we are now working with plastic companies, with Coca-Cola, with Dow. We`re working desperately to reshape the thinking of those who are making the stuff to create this infrastructure to take it back, to have a circular economy.

KINKADE: Linda Kinkade, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AZUZ: This gets a "10 Out of 10" for cuteness. It`s a Joey, a baby koala and though she was born at the Australia Zoo in January, she just started leaving his mother`s poach and appearing to the public. Her white fur that you see gives her a very rare color for a koala. She`s not technically an albino koala, which is actually more common.

The zoo says her mother has had other Joeys with lighter than usual fur, but that this girl really stands out.

The koa-lity care she`s getting is part of her mother`s koal-intuition. She`s koalamish about letting the juvenile Joey koala over the place.

Sight to see in your next trip to Koalstralia, this certainly koalifies and those are all the puns I can bear on CNN 10. I`m Koalazuz. Come back on Friday.