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You're tuned to a new show called Mostly Maui.
We are going through the Akaku vaults to find gems from Maui's past.
But we also want to see the videos that you send in.
So if you'd like to contribute to Mostly Maui, please call Dana Fulton at 8-7-1-5-5-4
because it's your show.
Mostly Maui.
Where are you?
What are you doing in the universe?
What is happening around you?
Way out here, in the far reaches of our milky way, among the asteroids and comets, at the
planets next door, on the surface of the sun.
Or right here at home, 24,000 miles above us in geo, geosynchronous orbit, or 250 miles
in Leo, low Earth orbit.
We look up to see brave and bold machines our science is sending to other worlds, and
closer to Earth, thousands of objects have our own making.
Many of them are ours, increasingly they are somebody else's.
They include one that captures the ancient light of distant galaxies, one we inhabit,
others that reveal what our world really looks like on a planetary scale, and hundreds of
thousands of pieces of space junk.
Today, what happens in space has changed everything about how we live and what we do.
Most of us don't realize how heavily we depend on those satellites, just for our day-to-day
business.
Your ATM doesn't work, your phone stopped working, your television signal no longer
comes in.
There are a number of things in our economy and your everyday life that would stop if
things in space didn't work.
If suddenly we were to lose those, our lives would be very different.
What we're trying to do is just to make sure we know where everything is that's out there.
Haleakala, the ancient place where Hawaiians call the sun, is the perfect vantage point
from which to scan the sky for natural and man-made objects.
Haleakala is 10,000 feet high in the middle of the ocean.
It's way above all the atmospheric troubles, turbulence and the weather, and it's a way
far away from the very strong city lights, and so it's a great place for looking up into
the sky at night time.
It is also the best place on earth for atmospheric seeing during the day.
Daylight imaging is very important because we need a capability to image satellites during
the daytime when they're active and then when they're lit by the sun.
The Maui Space Surveillance Site on the summit of Haleakala has a suite of some of the world's
most sophisticated and technologically advanced telescopes, shared and operated by the Air
Force Research Laboratory, the Air Force Space Command, and the University of Hawaii Institute
for Astronomy.
Some of these instruments, like pan stars, the largest digital camera on earth, survey
the night sky faster and more accurately from the ground than any other instrument yet invented.
It takes images of deep space, hunts earth-threatening asteroids, and looks at satellites in geo.
It's truly a wonder, and the University of Hawaii is doing wonderful things with it in
terms of finding things, seeing things that nobody's ever seen before, certainly from
the ground.
These instruments, like the advanced technology solar telescope, are being built to enable
astronomers to study aspects of the sun that no one has ever seen.
Never before have we had this big a jump in our ability to see the sun and to see the
environment of the sun.
The last time that mankind was able to make such a jump was at the time of Galileo.
The Air Force telescopes, such as AOS, the largest and most versatile telescope in the
Department of Defense, track satellites, spaceships like the former shuttle, the Hubble, the International
Space Station, and ever-increasing amounts of new material arriving in space.
Yeah, there's probably about 1,000 satellites that are operational that we keep track of.
There are thousands more that are no longer operational, and then there are just hundreds
of thousands of pieces of debris and junk that have fallen off the satellites.
There's a lot of debris, and as debris bumps into other debris, just like in the asteroid
belt, there's all, now you have more.
It is a danger.
You get something traveling at 22,000 miles an hour.
Even if it's very small, it can do a lot of damage.
If you think about it, you can have an object the size of a bolt that could really damage
a satellite.
And even if it's large, it's large in the middle of this vast plane of emptiness.
But every once in a while, you get things that come close enough to hit each other.
Very recently, within the last couple of years, a defunct Russian satellite ran into one of
our communication satellites.
The two smashed up and created thousands of pieces of debris that spread over the orbits
that they were in, and have created problems since in terms of other satellites needing
to make sure they don't run into them.
We have so many objects up there that things are going to bump into each other, and it
can be very expensive when some of these satellites cost billions of dollars.
It can definitely happen again.
Especially if somebody decides to blow one up on purpose.
Several years ago, the Chinese wanted to demonstrate that they had the capability of taking assets
away from us, and so they attacked one of their own satellites.
They had a weather satellite that was no longer being used, and they launched a rocket from
China and smashed it into that satellite and blew it up into lots of little pieces.
Unfortunately, they did it in a way that contributed an additional probably 20,000 new pieces of
space junk.
Space is not only getting crowded, it's getting contested.
It used to be the United States had space basically all to itself, but now lots of countries
are putting satellites in space.
They all want the same place to be in order to use the territory in space, so it's becoming
contested as you might expect.
Any land that everybody wants is going to be contested.
Well, many people do predict that our next war will be fought in space.
It's going to be a long, long time before you have somebody in their armored spacesuit
floating around the earth, you know, with a cannon in their hand.
If there are conflicts, there are things that one nation could do to another nation to limit
the capabilities of that nation.
We have a lot of important American assets in space, and we need to be able to monitor
those and make sure that they're not in jeopardy.
The expression here on earth is what you don't know can't hurt you.
But out here in space, what you don't know can, and if we are not forever vigilant, will
hurt you.
We know, for example, that it's not a question of if an asteroid will hit the earth, but
when it happens.
Certainly, pan stars can detect the next killer asteroid, killer, meaning at least one definition
could be that it has planet-wide impact.
Or you can have much smaller objects that can devastate local areas pretty dramatically.
In 1908, a 50-meter asteroid exploded in the atmosphere above Tunguska, Russia, with a force
of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs, destroying more than 830 square miles of forest.
We have already identified 5,000 potentially hazardous objects in space that are at least
100 meters in size.
And we know that there are at least 15,000 more yet to be discovered.
We also know that the odds are one in a thousand that something large enough to wipe out a
city will hit within the next 100 years.
The important thing is to discover them early so that you may have a chance to do something
about it.
There may be two areas in astronomy where mankind is directly affected by what we're
doing and learning in astronomy.
One of them has to do with understanding the near-space environment and asteroids and things
that may collide with the Earth, and the other is understanding the connection of the Sun
to the Earth.
And now, with the advent of the ATST, the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope in the
House of the Sun, we can begin to unlock the mysteries of our local star.
In 2003, right around Halloween, there was a major solar storm called a flare.
And that flare lasted for just a few seconds.
The energy, the flux, or the luminosity of X-rays, we say, went up by a thousand times.
Had there been any human life in space, it wouldn't be a life for long.
We lost two satellites, billion-dollar communication satellites, that were unable to handle the
sudden rise in energy that was coming at them from space.
We lost power over sections of the Swedish power grid up in the far north.
The effect on radio communication was enormous.
Planes over the polar regions were rerouted because of the inability to communicate, but
also because of the radiation.
The understanding or the ability to predict when something like this will happen is really
critical to making these systems work.
Making sense of the 45,000 images coming to the ATSD daily from the sun, or crunching
terabytes of data to post-process images of man-made objects in space, will require the
services of the Maui High Performance Computing Center, which is connected via fiber optic
cable with the instruments at the summit.
Tools like the supercomputer are a big part of the work that we do.
Even with the best computers and telescopes, there is one thing that the astronomers and
scientists on Haleagala have in common.
Objects in space are often impossible to see, hard to find, and difficult to image.
Most of what we're after is we're looking for needles in a haystack.
Yeah, space is hard because you're looking at things that are a long way away, and so
the light levels are really low, and then they have to go through a significant amount
of air and atmosphere.
So here you have these really small objects up there, and you don't have the capability
to look at them and get an image of them so you know exactly what they are, so we have
to try to use additional techniques.
Well, one of the things that we use is adaptive optics to correct for the atmosphere.
This is a real-time correction.
Adaptive optics requires you measuring the atmosphere at that moment, so you scan the
laser across the sky following the satellite, using it to correct the atmosphere so you
can take a picture of the satellite as it goes overhead.
It's pretty impressive what you can do with adaptive optics in real-time and then post-processing.
You can extract some details that when you look at the raw image you think there's no
way they can get that much information.
It's making something visible that wasn't visible before.
And today, because of this extraordinary working partnership between the Institute for Astronomy
and the Air Force Research Laboratory, Haleakala now represents the summit of space situational
awareness.
We can image better.
We know what's going on around us much better, and I've been pleased to have at least a
small role in seeing that develop over the years.
You love it?
Love it.
Absolutely love it.
And it couldn't be a better location.
It's Maui.
Haleakala, eku kila kilandei, Haleakala, eku kila kilandei, Haleakala, eku kila kilandei,
I'm Danielle.
And I'm Lauren.
And I'm the Bee Girls for Bee Facts.
Hi, I'm Danielle Downey here to tell you some bee facts.
The Varroa mite is the most devastating honeybee pest worldwide.
Beekeepers have been fighting it for decades, often using chemicals in their hives.
The mites arrived in Hawaii in 2007, but only on Big Island and Oahu.
Some bees show resistance to the Varroa mite.
They have grooming behaviors that remove mites.
Resistant bees can help Hawaii's beekeepers manage Varroa without chemicals.
So our apiary program is breeding and assessing resistant bees to help manage Varroa mites
without depending on chemicals.
I'm Danielle Downey for Bee Facts.
Until next time, be well.
We're the Bee Girls for Bee Facts.
In our finest moments, we do not need to justify our actions we luxuriate and are spontaneously
exuberant at the prospect of being alive.
When we are groping for reasons to live, we often forget about what should be just eminently
salient on a good day every day.
And that's that the purpose of life is living.
Free people feel no pain, free people got no shame, free people they ain't got no ties,
except the ones they love, it's the ones they love, the ones they love.
Free people never get invaded, free people blow the wind, for free people hands are
never touched, except by ones they love, it's the ones they love, the ones they love.
For free people things are things they're objects, for free people happiness is nothing, free
people traveling a free land made by ones who love, it's the ones who love, the ones
they love.
Free people, free people, let's talk about free people, free people, free people, what
do you think about free people, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
Made up of three very distinct and unique islands, each with its own character and style, Maui,
Molokai, and the night.
The good residents of Maui County understand that living on these islands is like paddling
a canoe.
Everyone must pull their own weight.
We must all work together.
We must all respect each other and support each other.
Otherwise, our canoe does not move forward.
Since our foundation, we here at Aakaku have stood for one thing and one thing only.
It is in our mission statement to empower our community's voice through access to media.
Public access is your right and it is up to you to keep it and defend it.
The islands in our county are separated by channels of living water and Aakaku will always
be here, ready to paddle this canoe forward with you and the community.
To emphasize your freedom of speech, share your culture, share art, ideas, philosophy,
religion, stand for what you believe in, protect your aina, and save the environment.
Aakaku is a Hawaiian word for extraordinary vision and we invite you to share your extraordinary
vision with the rest of Maui County.
In a world that is quietly trying to redefine freedom of speech, we invite you to stand
with us to protect community television made for and by the community.
In a unique and one of a kind tri-island county, public access, community media is a key tool
for sharing ideas and communicating so that we may know which way to point this canoe
so that we may all move forward together.
We at Aakaku Maui County Community Television humbly ask for your support so that we may
be here to serve you and your keiki for generations to come.
Create, share, motivate, educate, elevate society. Aakaku Maui County Community Media.
We are going to go on a trip around the world from a designer's perspective to places like
Madagascar, Japan, Borneo. These are the places that he goes to get his fabrics and his inspiration.
Music.
Freestyle.
Freestyle. Music.
Freestyle. Music.
Hit that beat like, like, like, like that.
My mind is like, my mind is like.
Big shit, big shit, big shit.
Hit that beat like King Pong, like.
Freestyle. Music.
Aakaku is good for you.
Music.
Aakaku is good for you.
Music.
Go to work in the morning.
Come home in the evening.
Nothing to say.
Make a million, yeah.
Make me a poster of an old royal.
Just give me one thing.
I can hold on to you.
To believe in this living.
Is just a hard way to go.
Thank you.
