By David Corrigan and Stephanie Salazar

[Video courtesy the White House and U.S. Marine Corps video by Lance Cpl. Robert Bush]

POHAKULOA, Hawaii: Meanwhile, in Obama’s State of the Union speech… the focus healing the economy took some of the spotlight away from the mention of decreased military spending.

The AP was reporting on Wednesday that The U.S. Army plans to slash the number of combat brigades from 45 to as low as 32 in a broad restructuring.

The Defense Department must come up with $487 billion in savings over the next decade, as order by Congress.

However, military officials have time and again stressed the importance of the Pacific – and Hawaii – to U.S. military interests.

That means training sessions like Lava Viper here at Pohakuloa will continue into the foreseeable future.

This footage, filmed on January 19th, shows U.S. Marines with the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment moving to a notional enemy position during the Lava Viper exercise at the Pohakuloa Training Area.

The troops trudge and scramble in formation over the rugged terrain taking aim at targets.

If you listen closely, you can hear the troops make mention of the precautions being taken to make sure the endangered Hawaiian nene goose are not harmed during the exercises.

Lava Viper is a battalion level combined arms training exercise to better prepare Marines for upcoming deployments.

By David Corrigan and Stephanie Salazar

[Video by David Corrigan]

POHAKULOA, Hawaii: This fender bender at the 43 mile marker closed Saddle Road to traffic for a short time on Tuesday.

The apparent crash happened at a yield sign entering a short, one lane bridge on the infamous “steps” portion of the road.

The pileup also appeared to involve three vehicles.

U.S. Army Fire and Police personnel responded to the scene, and stopped traffic in either direction for about 20 minutes, before opening the road up to alternating, single lane traffic.

At least one person was taken away by ambulance, although injuries did not appear life threatening.

In time, this treacherous stretch of roadway will be but a memory for most, as work has already begun constructing a new, safer stretch for the cross-island highway just to the south of this location.

By David Corrigan and Stephanie Salazar

[Video courtesy Lance Cpl. Robert Bush, U.S. Marines]

POHAKULOA TRAINING AREA, Hawaii: Pohakuloa was recently the host to this aptly named “Lava Viper” training exercise conducted by the U.S. Marines.

This first-person video, shot by Lance Cpl. Robert Bush and uploaded to YouTube on January 13th, shows U.S. Marines with the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment conducting a live hand grenade range at PTA.

Lava Viper is a battalion level combined arms training exercise to better prepare Marines for upcoming deployments.

The marine have been busy over the last few weeks at Pohakuloa Training Area… shooting high explosive rounds, smoke rounds, and 155mm illumination rounds … many of which were visible from Saddle Road.

[Video of eclipse by Baron Sekiya, Hawaii 247.com, images of snow at the summit courtesy UH-Hilo and Canada France Hawaii Telescope]

MAUNA KEA, Hawaii: A winter weather advisory remains in effect for mountain summits on the Big Island of Hawaii.

From the National Weather Service:

DEEP MOISTURE NEAR THE BIG ISLAND WILL CONTINUE TO BRING A WINTRY MIX OF WEATHER TO THE SUMMITS AND UPPER SLOPES OF MAUNA KEA AND MAUNA LOA TODAY.

…WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 PM HST THIS EVENING…

A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 PM HST THIS EVENING.

* LOCATIONS…THE SUMMITS OF MAUNA KEA AND MAUNA LOA.

* HAZARD TYPES…SNOW AND ICE ABOVE 11000 FEET.

* ACCUMULATIONS…1 TO 2 INCHES OF ADDITIONAL SNOWFALL.

* TIMING…THROUGH TODAY.

Instructions: A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY MEANS THAT PERIODS OF SNOW…SLEET…OR FREEZING RAIN WILL CAUSE TRAVEL DIFFICULTIES. BE PREPARED FOR SLIPPERY ROADS AND LIMITED VISIBILITIES…AND USE CAUTION WHILE DRIVING.

Before the snow fell on Mauna Kea, Hawaii Island was abuzz over a rare celestial event on Saturday morning.

The full moon was in total eclipse in the early morning hours, the last time there will be such a lunar event over Hawaii until 2014.

This shot was taken by Baron Sekiya of Hawaii24/7 from the Mauna Kea visitors center… a chilly place to be in December.

A few hours later, the same weather system that brought heavy wind and rain to the island also left snow on the summit.

It looked like a blizzard on the Muana Kea webcams Sunday evening, while the summits were under a Winter Weather Advisory.

Several inches reportedly fell on the summit, and in some areas, snow drifts were reported in excess of three feet.

On Sunday, the Mauna Kea summit access road was closed to the public at the Visitor Information Station gate due to snow and ice on the roadways.

By David Corrigan and Stephanie Salazar

[VNR courtesy NASA/AMES]

MAUNA KEA, Hawaii: Today, we continue what seems to be a trend this week…

Big astronomy announcements, connected in some way to Mauna Kea.

For example, it was just announced that the Keck I telescope has been used to establish the mass of a planet in the habitable zone around a star—that’s the region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface.

The new exoplanet – named Kepler-22b – was detected using NASA’s Kepler spacecraft.

Kepler needs to observe a possible exoplanet three times as it passes in front of its star – or “transits” – in order to “verify a signal”. The astronomers then turn to the Keck I telescope’s powerful HIRES spectrometer to determine the mass of the exoplanet candidates.

The discovery was big news, especially among the astronomy community, as is evident in this Video news release by NASA.

The W.M. Keck Observatory also adapted their own media release about the big find:

The Keck I telescope has been used to establish the mass of a planet in the habitable zone around a star—that’s the region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. The newly confirmed exoplanet, Kepler-22b, is the smallest yet found to orbit in the middle of the habitable zone of a star similar to our Sun. The exoplanet is about 2.4 times the radius of Earth. Scientists don’t yet know if Kepler-22b has a predominantly rocky, gaseous or liquid composition, but its discovery is a step closer to finding Earth-like exoplanets.

Previous research hinted at the existence of near-Earth-size planets in habitable zones, but clear confirmation has proved very difficult. Two other small planets orbiting stars smaller and cooler than our Sun recently were confirmed on the very edges of the habitable zone, with orbits more closely resembling those of Venus and Mars than that of Earth.

“This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin,” said Douglas Hudgins, scientist for NASA’s Kepler mission, which first detected the planet.

The Kepler spacecraft was launched in March of 2009 as a NASA Discovery Mission designed to search for exoplanets. The spacecraft has an 84-megapixel camera which stares continuously at a field of 150,000 stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. Kepler discovers exoplanet candidates by measuring dips in the brightness stars to search for exoplanets that cross in front of, or “transit,” the stars. The process is similar to what occurs during a solar eclipse: in that case, our Moon temporarily blocks light from our Sun, but in this case the distant planet moves across the face of the distant star and causes a much smaller decrease in the amount of light we observe from the star. Kepler requires at least three transits to verify a signal as a exoplanet. Astronomers then turn to the Keck I telescope’s powerful HIRES spectrometer to determine the mass of the exoplanet candidates.

“Fortune smiled upon us with the detection of this planet,” said William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., who led the team that discovered Kepler-22b. “The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season.”

Kepler-22b and its anonymous parent star are located 600 light-years away. While the planet is more massive than Earth, its orbit of 290 days around a Sun-like star resembles that of our world. The planet’s host star belongs to the same class as our Sun, called G-type, although it is slightly smaller and cooler.

Of the 54 habitable-zone planet candidates identified by the Dr. Borucki’s team in February 2011, Kepler-22b is the first to be confirmed. The discovery of this milestone will be published in a research paper to appear in The Astrophysical Journal.

Early in its mission, the Kepler satellite discovered many large planets in small orbits, which comprised the bulk of the planets reported in the February data release. Now that the science team has had time to acquire data over a period long enough to observe three transits of earthlike planets with longer orbital periods, their findings suggest that planets one to four times the size of Earth may be abundant in the galaxy.

Since Feburary 2011, the number of Earth-size planet candidates has doubled and the count of super-Earth-size candidates is now 40 percent higher than before.

The Kepler team has now revised its estimate of the number of habitable-zone planets to 48, down from 54 reported in Feburary. This decrease results from an updated definition of the “habitable zone” which now accounts for the warming effect of planetary atmospheres. This change moves the habitable zone further away from the star and, as a result, certain stars with shorter orbital periods are no longer classified as existing within the habitable zone.

“The tremendous growth in the number of Earth-size candidates tells us that we’re honing in on the planets Kepler was designed to detect: those that are not only Earth-size, but also are potentially habitable,” said Natalie Batalha, Kepler deputy science team lead at San Jose State University in California. “The more data we collect, the keener our eye for finding the smallest planets out at longer orbital periods.”

The W. M. Keck Observatory operates two 10-meter optical/infrared telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The twin telescopes feature a suite of advanced instruments including imagers, multi-object spectrographs, high-resolution spectrographs, integral-field spectroscopy and a world-leading laser guide star adaptive optics system which cancels out much of the interference caused by Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. The Observatory is a private 501(c) 3 non-profit organization and a scientific partnership of the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA.

By David Corrigan and Stephanie Salazar

[Video elements courtesy Joint Astronomy Centre]

MAUNA KEA, Hawaii: A revolutionary new camera that will reveal the dark side of the universe has been unveiled at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope.

A new camera – called SCUBA-2 – is far more sensitive and powerful than previous instruments and can map areas of the sky hundreds of times faster, according to a media release.

SCUBA-2 will provide unprecedented information on the early life of stars – normally obscured by the remains of the very dust and gas cloud that collapsed under its own gravity to form the star.

For example, this composite image (right) of the Whirlpool Galaxy, 31 million light years from Earth, also known as M51: The green image is from the Hubble Space Telescope and shows the optical wavelength. The submillimetre light detected by SCUBA-2 is shown in red and blue. SCUBA-2 detects the warm glow from dust in the dark regions along the spiral arms where new stars are being born.

One of the most incredible things about the new camera: in order to detect the extremely low energy radiation in the submillimetre region of the spectrum… The detectors inside SCUBA-2 have to be cooled to only 0.1 degree above absolute zero [-273.05°C], making the interior of SCUBA-2 the coldest place in the Universe that we know of.

From the media release:

“When you look up at the stars, you only see the light they are emitting in the visible part of the spectrum. Many galaxies, including our own Milky Way, contain huge amounts of cold dust that absorbs visible light and these dusty regions just look black when seen through an optical telescope. The absorbed energy is then re-radiated by the dust at longer, submillimetre, wavelengths”, explains Professor Gary Davis, Director of the JCMT. “SCUBA-2 has been designed to detect extremely low energy radiation in the submillimetre region of the spectrum. To do this, the instrument itself needs to be even colder. The detectors inside SCUBA-2 have to be cooled to only 0.1 degree above absolute zero [-273.05°C], making the interior of SCUBA-2 colder than anything in the Universe that we know of!”

The project was led by STFC’s UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UKATC) in Edinburgh in collaboration with a world-wide consortium of leading laboratories including four universities (British Columbia, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Waterloo), the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Joint Astronomy Centre, which operates the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope.

Professor Ian Robson, Director of the UKATC, said: “The heart of SCUBA-2, the detector arrays, are a huge achievement; a world-first and the technological challenges in making them have been absolutely immense. It is equivalent to going from a primitive wind-on film camera that people over 50 might remember using straight to a modern digital camera all in one step. It is thanks to the ingenuity and abilities of our scientists and engineers that this immense leap in progress has been achieved.”

UK, Canadian and Dutch researchers have pioneered observations of the sky in the submillimetre wavelength range (0.4 to 1 millimetre) through their partnership on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. SCUBA-2′s predecessor, SCUBA (Submillimetre Common User Bolometer Array) produced many new and unexpected discoveries, from a previously unknown population of distant, dusty galaxies (known ever since as ‘SCUBA galaxies’), to the first images of cold debris discs around nearby stars, which may indicate the presence of planetary systems.

Commenting on the performance of the new instrument, Professor Wayne Holland of UKATC, and the SCUBA-2 Project Scientist, said “With SCUBA, it typically took 20 nights to image an area about the size of the full Moon. SCUBA-2 will be able to cover the same area in a couple of hours and go much deeper, allowing us to detect faint objects that have never been seen before.”

The increased mapping speed and sensitivity of SCUBA-2 make it ideal for large-scale surveys; no other instrument will be able to survey the submillimetre sky in such exquisite detail. Dr Antonio Chrysostomou, Associate Director of the JCMT said “SCUBA-2′s first task will be to carry out a series of surveys right across the heavens, mapping sites of star formation within our Galaxy, as well as planet formation around nearby stars. It will also survey our galactic neighbours and crucially, will look deep into space and sample the youngest galaxies in the Universe, which will be critical to understanding how galaxies have evolved since the Big Bang”.

The data obtained by these surveys will allow a new and precise understanding of star formation throughout the history of the universe, and complements research being carried out on other telescopes such as the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA), currently undergoing commissioning in Chile.

By David Corrigan and Stephanie Salazar

[image courtesy NASA/JPL]

MAUNA KEA, Hawaii: Observations made from the summit of Mauna Kea continue to assist astronomers in turning up new planets.

Said to be largest single announcement of planets in orbit around stars more massive than the sun, aside from the discoveries made by the Kepler mission, a team led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology used the Keck Observatory to find 18 exoplanets, recently.

This finding marks a 50 percent increase in the number of known planets orbiting massive stars. The discovery helps researches understand how planets might form… the findings also lend further support to the theory that planets grow from seed particles that accumulate gas and dust in a disk surrounding a newborn star.

From the Keck Observatory:

A whopping 18 new, bona fide exoplanets have been discovered and confirmed by a team of Caltech astronomers using the Keck Telescopes and two other ground-based observatories.

“It’s the largest single announcement of planets in orbit around stars more massive than the sun, aside from the discoveries made by the Kepler mission,” says John Johnson, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech and the first author on the team’s paper, which was published in the December issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. The Kepler mission is a space telescope that has so far identified more than 1,200 possible planets, though the majority of those have not yet been confirmed.

Using the Keck Observatory—with follow-up observations using the McDonald and Fairborn Observatories in Texas and Arizona, respectively—the researchers surveyed about 300 stars. They focused on those dubbed “retired” A-type stars that are more than one and a half times more massive than the sun. These stars are just past the main stage of their life—hence, “retired”—and are now puffing up into what’s called a subgiant star.

To look for planets, the astronomers searched for stars of this type that wobble, which could be caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet. The wobble is given away by the fact that the light of those stars have a periodic lengthening and contracting of wavelengths due to the stars’ motion away from and toward the observer—better known as a Doppler shift. Using this, the team found 18 planets with masses similar to Jupiter’s.

This new bounty marks a 50 percent increase in the number of known planets orbiting massive stars and, according to Johnson, provides an invaluable population of planetary systems for understanding how planets—and our own solar system—might form. The researchers say that the findings also lend further support to the theory that planets grow from seed particles that accumulate gas and dust in a disk surrounding a newborn star.

According to this theory, tiny particles start to clump together, eventually snowballing into a planet. If this is the true sequence of events, the characteristics of the resulting planetary system—such as the number and size of the planets, or their orbital shapes—will depend on the mass of the star. For instance, a more massive star would mean a bigger disk, which in turn would mean more material to produce a greater number of giant planets.

In another theory, planets form when large amounts of gas and dust in the disk spontaneously collapse into big, dense clumps that then become planets. But in this picture, it turns out that the mass of the star doesn’t affect the kinds of planets that are produced.

So far, as the number of discovered planets has grown, astronomers are finding that stellar mass does seem to be important in determining the prevalence of giant planets. The newly discovered planets further support this pattern—and are therefore consistent with the first theory, the one stating that planets are born from seed particles.

“It’s nice to see all these converging lines of evidence pointing toward one class of formation mechanisms,” Johnson says.

The new batch of planets have yet another interesting pattern: their orbits are mainly circular, while planets around sunlike stars span a wide range of circular to elliptical paths. Johnson says he’s now trying to find an explanation.

For Johnson, these discoveries have been a long time coming. This latest find, for instance, comes from an astronomical survey that he started while a graduate student; because these planets have wide orbits, they can take a couple of years to make a single revolution, meaning that it can also take quite a few years before their stars’ periodic wobbles become apparent to an observer.

“I liken it to a garden—you plant the seeds and put a lot of work into it,” he says. “Then, a decade in, your garden is big and flourishing. That’s where I am right now. My garden is full of these big, bright, juicy tomatoes—these Jupiter-sized planets.”

The other authors on the The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series paper, “Retired A stars and their companions VII. Eighteen new Jovian planets,” include former Caltech undergraduate Christian Clanton, who graduated in 2010; Caltech postdoctoral scholar Justin Crepp; and nine others from the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii; the University of California, Berkeley; the Center of Excellence in Information Systems at Tennessee State University; the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas, Austin; and the Pennsylvania State University. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA.

The W. M. Keck Observatory operates two 10-meter optical/infrared telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The twin telescopes feature a suite of advanced instruments including imagers, multi-object spectrographs, high-resolution spectrographs, integral-field spectroscopy and a world-leading laser guide star adaptive optics system which cancels out much of the interference caused by Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. The Observatory is a private 501(c) 3 non-profit organization and a scientific partnership of the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA.

By David Corrigan and Tim Bryan

[Video courtesy NAVAIR]

HILO, Hawaii: The Department of the Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, published a draft Environmental Impact Statement for basing and operating MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft and H-1 Cobra and Huey helicopters in Hawaii.

These aircraft will be used in support of Marine Expeditionary Force units stationed in Hawaii. The Draft EIS was posted in the Federal Register last week and is available on the website http://www.mcbh.usmc.mil/MV22H1EIS. A 45-day public comment period is underway.

The Marines want to conduct training in Hawaii with up to two Marine Medium Tiltrotor squadrons with a total of 24 MV-22 aircraft, and one Marine Light Attack Helicopter squadron composed of 15 AH-1 and 12 UH-1 helicopters.

Improvements to accommodate the new aviation squadrons are planned. Pohakuloa Training Area is on the list. The document says the military will be looking to expand the existing helipads at PTA.

The Draft EIS assesses potential environmental impacts of the proposal.

Because the squadrons would train on land owned or controlled by the Department of the Army, the Army is a cooperating agency in the preparation of this EIS.

Five public comment meetings are scheduled to share information and to receive oral and written comments.

On Hawaii Island, two meetings will be held.

November 30th at Waimea Elementary School Cafeteria, from 5:30-6:30 p.m.

And on December 1st, at Hilo Intermediate School Cafeteria.

Media release from the W.M. Keck Observatory:

Kamuela HI – One of the world’s largest optical/infrared telescopes has captured near-infrared light images of asteroid YU55 as it was departing its close flyby of Earth the night of Nov. 8, 2011. The observing run on the Keck II telescope was webcast live to a large audience on UStream directly from the Keck II Telescope Remote Operations room in Kamuela, Hawaii.

At the helm of the 10-meter telescope and using Keck’s pioneering adaptive optics to view YU55 were asteroid investigators William Merline and Peter Tamblyn of Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo.; and Chris Neyman of Keck Observatory.

The first unprocessed infrared images of the coal-black asteroid appear to confirm that the asteroid does not have any small companion satellites and that it may be somewhat smaller than some researchers have suspected.

Asteroid YU55, made its closest approach to Earth – just 324,600 kilometers – on Nov. 8 at 3:26 pm U.S. PST. Merline’s research is funded by NASA’s Planetary Astronomy Program and NSF’s Planetary Astronomy Program. More updates and images are forthcoming.

# # #

The W. M. Keck Observatory operates two 10-meter optical/infrared telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The twin telescopes feature a suite of advanced instruments including imagers, multi-object spectrographs, high-resolution spectrographs, integral-field spectroscopy and a world-leading laser guide star adaptive optics system which cancels out much of the interference caused by Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. The Observatory is a private 501(c) 3 non-profit organization and a scientific partnership of the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA.

The embedded video above is from the Keck Asteroid Watch broadcast 11/9/11 on UStream.

By David Corrigan and Stephanie Salazar

[Video by David Corrigan]

HILO, Hawaii: The public weighed-in on U.S. Army’s plan to upgrade facilities at the Pohakuloa training Area on Tuesday night.

At this hearing held at Aunty Sally’s Luau Hale in Hilo, residents had plenty to say about the proposed project – which will construct new ranges and Soldier support facilities, new roads and utilities at PTA.

The document specifically evaluates constructing and operating an Infantry Platoon Battle Area that would include a Battle Course, Live-fire Shoothouse, and Military Operations on Urban Terrain facility.

The Army says there is no proposed expansion or use above historic levels, but it is clear that the public has a different impression. Many of those testifying in opposition were passionate advocates for the environment and for Hawaiian sovereignty.

By David Corrigan and Stephanie Salazar

[Video courtesy Canada France Hawaii Telescope]

MAUNA KEA, Hawaii: A winter weather advisory was in effect from Tuesday afternoon for Big island summits…

As you can see from these summit webcams, the passing wintry weather left a dusting of snow around the observatories during the daylight hours…’

According to the Mauna Kea Observatory Forecast… Fog, ice, clouds and flurries were expected to plague the summit through the night; there was also the possibility for convection and periods of heavy snow.

The same is expected Thursday, Friday and into the weekend. Forecasters say extensive cloud cover and overcast skies are likely through the next 5 nights