After days of fighting rumors about alien visitations, the managers of the Sunspot Solar Observatory in New Mexico say they’re reopening the facility — and have shed more light on the reason for its 10-day security-related closure.
NASA kicked off its ICESat-2 mission to monitor our planet’s ice sheets from space using a laser-scanning satellite this morning, with a launch that marked the end of a nearly 30-year run for United Launch Alliance’s Delta 2 rocket.
Liftoff came at 6:02 a.m. PT from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, after a slight delay in the countdown due to concerns about the chilldown of the rocket’s helium bottles. The two-stage rocket made a trouble-free ascent to orbit.
ICESat-2 follows up on an earlier NASA mission that used laser-ranging data to measure ice sheet balance and sea level. This time around, the laser-scanning instrument will be capable of measuring Earth’s elevation every 30 inches (70 centimeters) across a 30-foot-wide track as it circles the planet.
The data will help scientists determine how climate change is affecting global ice levels, and how changes in the ice affect the height of Earth’s oceans.
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Conservationists mourn loss of sick orca
The emaciated and ailing killer whale known as J50 or Scarlet has disappeared from her family group, and experts presume that she’s dead. Nevertheless, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its partners are continuing the effort to find her, dead or alive.
“We have alerted the West Coast Marine Mammal Stranding Network, which is a tremendous resource in such situations,” NOAA said in its Sept. 13 update. “Airlines flying in and out of the San Juan Islands are also on the lookout.”
NOAA said the hotline for stranding reports is 1-866-767-6114.
The last confirmed sighting of J50 was reported on Sept. 7 by NOAA, the SeaDoc Society and other observers. J50’s presumed loss comes after weeks of efforts to get her medicine and extra food. Experts were never able to diagnose exactly what was ailing the whale.
The 3-year-old orca’s plight captured worldwide attention over the past couple of months. So did the case of J35, also called Tahlequah, another orca from the same pod who was seen carrying her dead calf for 17 days this summer.
FRIDAY HARBOR, Wash. — This week’s Salish Sea Expedition is unfolding amid the heavily trafficked waters off the San Juan Islands, but there’s still plenty of room here for scientific discoveries.
For example, researchers riding a deep-water submersible called Cyclops 1 announced that they discovered a new low for the feeding grounds of a prickly marine species known as the red sea urchin.
“We extended the range of red urchins to 284 meters,” Alex Lowe, a marine biologist at the University of Washington, proudly declared at UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories, which is serving as the base of operations for this week’s expedition.
The expedition aims to assess the health of the habitats and species in the Salish Sea, a body of water that takes in the coastal waterways around the U.S.-Canadian border, from the Strait of Georgia to Puget Sound. The Salish Sea offers a rich ecosystem as well as a tourist destination and an increasingly busy shipping lane, but its murky waters make it challenging to study in depth — and at depth.
To remedy that, the expedition’s organizers are making use of Cyclops 1, a five-person craft that can descend far deeper than scuba divers go.
The survey expedition is a joint undertaking that involves scientists from the UW and other research institutions, with support from the non-profit SeaDoc Society and the OceanGate Foundation. Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate, which built Cyclops 1, is playing the lead role in getting the researchers to their underwater destinations.
A year and a half after saying it had two passengers signed up for a privately funded flight around the moon, SpaceX says it will reveal the first passenger’s identity on Sept. 17.
The news of the day is all about Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ philanthropic efforts, but on the business side of things, an influential financial analyst argues that the world’s richest man is an “emerging force” with the financial muscle to advance the global space industry — and Amazon as well.
In a note to investors, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas and his colleagues say Bezos’ Blue Origin venture, as well as Amazon, should be included along with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and more than 100 other firms as key participants in a commercial space race.
Jonas writes that investors may want to pay far more attention to Bezos’ space efforts, which the billionaire has said is the “most important work that I’m doing.”
NASA and Russia’s space agency issued a joint statement today aimed at quashing viral claims that someone on the International Space Station’s crew sabotaged a Soyuz capsule by drilling a hole in orbit and creating an air leak.
The statement came two weeks after the crew discovered and patched the hole — and 10 days after Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of in-space sabotage.
Amazon is well-known for developing delivery drones, and for delivering data through Amazon Web Services — so it had to be only a matter of time before someone at Amazon came up with the idea of delivering data via drones.
Actually, Abdul Sathar Sait came up with the idea back in 2014, when he was a principal product manager at AWS. And although he has since moved on to Oracle Cloud, Amazon officially has the patent as of today.
The patent application for “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Data Services” describes a system by which network users can put in an order for enhanced data services, and have a drone flown out to the user’s location to provide those services.
Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith today signaled that the Kent, Wash.-based space company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos is aiming to start flying people on suborbital space trips “early next year,” rather than later this year as previously envisioned.
SpaceIL’s lunar lander is go for launch as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that’s due to send a telecommunications satellite into geosynchronous orbit, Seattle-based Spaceflight announced today.
The launch, expected early next year, would represent the first Spaceflight rideshare mission to go beyond low Earth orbit. And Israel-based SpaceIL’s mission would represent the first non-governmental landing on the moon.
Spaceflight timed its announcement to coincide with Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business Week conference in Paris. It said rideshare opportunities to geosynchronous transfer orbit, or GTO, would be made available every 12 to 18 months, or as customer demand requires.
Although Spaceflight didn’t identify the primary payload for Spaceflight’s first GTO mission, it’s thought to be the PSN-6 telecommunications satellite, which was built for Indonesia’s PT Pasifik Satelit Nusantara by SSL, a Maxar Technologies subsidiary. This would be the first combined launch for Spaceflight and SSL.