Cosmic Log
Tesla shares fell by as much as 6.5 percent today after Bloomberg News reported that the electric-car company was the subject of a criminal investigation by the Justice Department, focusing on CEO Elon Musk’s claims that he had secured the funding to take Tesla private.
The “funding secured” comment, posted on Twitter on Aug. 7, has also sparked increased scrutiny for civil action by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk today introduced Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa as the first paying customer for a trip around the moon.
“Finally I can tell you that ‘I choose to go to the moon,’” Maezawa said, echoing President John F. Kennedy’s famous phrase.
Maezawa, 42, founded a mail-order retail business called Start Today in 1998, which spawned what’s now Japan’s largest fashion retail website, known as Zozotown. His net worth is estimated at more than $3 billion.
He’s made a name for himself as a musician and art collector as well as an entrepreneur. During tonight’s big reveal at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., Maezawa said he intended to invite six to eight artists from around the world, on the level of the late Pablo Picasso or Michael Jackson, to go around the moon with him.
BELLEVUE, Wash. — Pivotal Commware, a venture that’s backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, is in the midst of a fresh funding round that could bring in $20 million or more for its effort to develop flat-panel antennas that boost wireless communications.
In documents filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Bellevue-based startup said that four investors have put $14.75 million into a Series B equity funding round so far.
The filing says the offering amounts to $20 million, with $5.25 million yet to be sold. However, Pivotal Commware’s vice president of marketing and sales, Kent Lundgren, told GeekWire via email that the final amount of the round is yet to be determined.
Lundgren said participants in the round could include “some new strategic investors,” but declined to go into further detail.
If you see a lot of blue lights around Seattle landmarks this week, it’s not in honor of the Seahawks — this time, the color scheme is paying tribute to another one of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s pet projects, the Allen Institute.
Hot spots such as CenturyLink Field, home of the Seahawks; and Columbia Tower, Seattle’s tallest building, will be turning on their cool-blue mood lighting to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the institute’s founding in 2003.
The first science images from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite focus on a strip of southern sky that includes the two nearest dwarf galaxies and plenty of potential targets in the probe’s planet search.
“In a sea of stars brimming with new worlds, TESS is casting a wide net and will haul in a bounty of promising planets for further study,” Paul Hertz, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters, said today in a news release. “This ‘first light’ science image shows the capabilities of TESS’ cameras, and shows that the mission will realize its incredible potential in our search for another Earth.”
TESS was launched from Florida in April by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and the mission team has been spending the past few months getting the spacecraft ready for what’s expected to be a two-year mission.
The newly released imagery was captured by TESS’ four wide-field cameras during a 30-minute session on Aug. 7. The mosaic shows parts of a dozen constellations in the southern hemisphere, from Capricornus to Pictor.
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.
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.