By John Johnson Jr.

December 10, 2009

One might think that after centuries of scanning the night skies, mankind would have a pretty clear idea of who our galactic neighbors are, and whether they mean us harm.

That’s not the case. Vast landscapes of the cosmos remain hidden to us because most of our telescopes plumb the heavens for light that can be seen by the human eye — and that constitutes only a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum.

“Think of a wall map,” said Edward Wright, an astronomy professor at UCLA.The map may show the whole world, “but I can’t figure out from it where the national parks are. If I have an atlas with a much more detailed view, I can plan my vacation.”

Making a better atlas is what Wright and his colleagues hope to do with NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, space mission. Scheduled to launch Friday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the $320-million spacecraft will photograph the entire night sky in infrared light. In the process, it will capture hundreds of thousands of previously unknown objects that are too cool and too dark to light up our nighttime sky.

Like alleyway skulkers with hats pulled low over their eyes, these objects have been lurking around space for millions of years, yet hidden from view. These denizens of the dark are likely to include tens of thousands of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter — some of which could turn out to be an eventual threat to Earth; dozens of failed stars known as brown dwarfs; possibly even a giant planet out beyond Pluto.

Scientists say WISE could revise the familiar portrait of our solar system.

“What we’re doing with WISE is opening up the sky in a way that hasn’t been possible before. It will transform the picture of our solar neighborhood,” said Peter Eisenhardt, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, where the mission is managed. “It will give scientists things to study for decades.”

Steinn Sigurdsson, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University who is not affiliated with the mission, agrees that WISE offers “considerable prospects for significant discoveries.”

It’s even possible, he says, that the mission could find planets around other stars.

Of course, this isn’t the first time anyone has thought of scanning the sky in wavelengths other than the narrow region of visible light. Radio telescopes like the Arecibo instrument in Puerto Rico search deep space for the long radio waves emitted by many galaxies. Other instruments try to capture the intensely short and dangerous gamma rays released by exploding stars.

But some things, such as the process in which stars form from balls of hard-to-see interstellar gas, are much easier to study in the infrared, which can pick up very dim and relatively cool objects.

“From my perspective, this is an incredibly exciting mission,” said Andrea Ghez, an astronomy professor at UCLA who is not part of the WISE team.

The forerunner to WISE was NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite. Launched in 1983, it probed the entire sky in the infrared, increasing the number of cataloged astronomical objects by a staggering 70%. It detected 350,000 new objects, including comets and wisps of invisible but warm dust clouds in almost every direction of space.

But by using just 62 pixels to measure the heavens, that satellite was a dim flashlight compared to WISE.

Each of WISE’s four detectors will scan space with 1 million pixels, making the suite of instruments thousands of times more sensitive.

After being launched by a Delta II rocket, WISE will settle into orbit about 326 miles above the Earth’s surface. The heart of the 9-foot-tall spacecraft is a 16-inch-diameter telescope housed in a shroud of solid, frozen hydrogen called a cryostat. This floating ice chest is designed to keep the instruments so cold — as low as minus 445 degrees Fahrenheit — that the four detectors will not accidentally pick up heat from the mission’s own electronics.

The first class of objects likely to pop out of hiding is a type of failed star called a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs didn’t possess the sheer bulk necessary to sustain the nuclear fusion reaction that causes stars like our sun to burst into flames after collapsing from a ball of gas.

Brown dwarfs don’t shine, except in the infrared. Their temperatures, ranging from a downright icy minus 330 degrees to 1,300 degrees, are remnants of the heat generated by their gravitational collapse.

According to Eisenhardt, many scientists believe there are as many brown dwarfs in any region of space as regular stars. Within 25 light-years of the sun, there are about 100 known stars, only six of which are brown dwarfs. That means there could be another 90 or so brown dwarfs in that area awaiting discovery.

There is an even chance, Wright said, that one might be closer than the conventional star Proxima Centauri. Four light-years away, Proxima holds the record for our closest starry neighbor.

“That would be a very exciting discovery,” Eisenhardt said.

Within our solar system, WISE will probably uncover as many as 100,000 new asteroids in the rocky junk pile between Mars and Jupiter. The several hundred thousand asteroids we know now consist mostly of those with surfaces that reflect light well.

Further, the conventional way to measure an asteroid, Wright said, is to equate its size with its brightness. But some things just don’t reflect as well as others, regardless of size. Because WISE will see temperature differences, it will provide a much better tool for judging size, Eisenhardt said.

That doesn’t mean the spacecraft will find a “doomsday asteroid” that poses a threat to Earth. What it does mean is that the mission will help scientists judge the size of any threatening asteroid, giving greater advance warning about the ones that could be the next weapon of extinction, like the one suspected of wiping out the dinosaurs.

Finally, Eisenhardt and other members of the WISE team think there is a decent possibility of finding a new planet on the fringes of our solar system.

The solar system’s Wild West is the Kuiper Belt, where thousands of icy bodies roam, including Pluto, the former ninth planet in our solar system that lost its status when the International Astronomical Union decided several years ago that it was too small to be a planet. Beyond that is the Oort Cloud, the home of lots of comets that occasionally wander into the inner solar system.

“We know stuff is out there,” Eisenhardt said. “It’s possible there could be a planet larger than Jupiter.”

Roger Launius, a space expert at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., was skeptical of that kind of speculation. “There’s no theoretical work that suggests there’s a big planet out there,” he said.

Still, though Launius admits to bouts of cynicism in the face of NASA “ballyhooing” its missions, he said this one could yield important findings. “This is part of the electromagnetic spectrum where we haven’t done that much.”

• (CBS/iStockphoto)

(CBS/AP)

U.S. refineries bought millions of dollars worth of oil stolen from Mexican government pipelines and smuggled across the border, the U.S. Justice Department told The Associated Press – illegal operations now led by Mexican drug cartels expanding their reach.

Criminals – mostly drug gangs – tap remote pipelines, sometimes building pipelines of their own, to siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars worth of oil each year, the Mexican oil monopoly said. At least one U.S. oil executive has pleaded guilty to conspiracy in such a deal.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Homeland Security department is scheduled to return $2.4 million to Mexico’s tax administration, the first batch of money seized during a binational investigation into smuggled oil that authorities expect to lead to more arrests and seizures.

“The United States is working with the Mexican government on the theft of oil,” said Nancy Herrera, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Houston. “It’s an ongoing investigation, with one indictment so far.”

In that case, Donald Schroeder, president of Houston-based Trammo Petroleum, is scheduled to be sentenced in December after pleading guilty in May.

In a $2 million scheme, Herrera said, Schroeder purchased stolen Mexican oil that had been brought across the border in trucks and barges and sold it to various U.S. refineries, which she did not identify. Trammo’s tiny firm profited about $150,000 in the scheme, she said.

Schroeder’s attorneys said in an e-mail that neither they nor their client would respond to AP’s requests for comment.

Bill Holbrook, spokesman for the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association, said a single indictment against a small company should not be used to smear the reputation of the entire U.S. oil industry, “and is not indicative of how domestic refiners operate.”

But in Mexico, federal police commissioner Rodrigo Esparza said the Zetas, a fierce drug gang aligned with the Gulf cartel, used false import documents to smuggle at least $46 million worth of oil in tankers to unnamed U.S. refineries.

A law enforcement source told CBS News illicit proceeds from the scheme involving theft from the Mexican government-owned Pemex oil conglomerate were seized in the investigation.

In a surprising public acknowledgment, Mexican President Felipe Calderon said last week that drug cartels have extended their operations into the theft of oil, Mexico’s leading source of foreign income which finances about 40 percent of the national budget.

“These are Mexican resources, and we do not have to sit back or turn a blind eye,” Calderon said. “This is our national heritage and we must defend it.”

Highly sophisticated thieves using Pemex equipment “are basically working day and night, seeing how they can penetrate our infrastructure,” said Pemex spokesman Carlos Ramirez. The thieves, operating in remote parts of the country, have even built tunnels and their own pipelines to siphon off the product, he said.

How much of the stolen oil is crossing into the U.S., and how much of the theft is at the hands of cartels? So far, nobody knows.

“These questions are really the center point of all of this,” Ramirez said.

He said cartels in northern Mexico are responsible for most of the theft, though he said there may well be internal operatives at Pemex stealing as well. Last week, police raided Pemex offices looking for insider misconduct.

Trammo, the sole company named in court records so far, is dwarfed by any refiner most people have heard of. It sells some 2.1 million barrels a year.

Major refiners such as San Antonio-based Valero Energy can produce more than that in a single day, buying crude from tankers or pipelines, and none has been implicated in buying stolen oil.

“It is Exxon Mobil’s policy to always obey relevant laws, rules and regulations everywhere we operate,” said spokesman Kevin Allexon. Shell Oil Co. said it abides by all laws.

Various kinds of petroleum products, including gasoline, are being stolen and sold to gas stations and factories in Mexico, said Ramirez, adding that service stations in at least two states have been shut down recently for selling stolen gas.

The thefts are a devastating blow to Pemex, which saw production fall 7.5 percent in the first half of the year.

So far this year, Pemex is aware of 190 different thefts, almost half in the Gulf state of Veracruz. Ramirez said Pemex is using hidden cameras, extra guards and additional investigators to catch the thieves, but the problem is still spreading: So far this year, oil theft is up 10 percent, and have been confirmed in 19 states, up from 13 in 2008.

And oil theft experts say that just like drugs, the crimes will be tough to stop as long as there’s money to be made.

“U.S. refineries willing to buy stolen crude don’t care where it comes from. Once the product is at their doorstep, the deal is done, and they can pay pennies on the dollar without taking the risk of getting it across the border,” said Kent Chrisman, director for global security with Oklahoma City-based Devon Energy.

Chrisman, a former Secret Service agent, recently teamed up with Texas law enforcement agents to bust a ring of thieves in that state.

Oil theft in general is a relatively new problem, Chrisman said, “but we’ve seen a big spike in recent years because oil prices went up. Every year it seems to get worse and worse. It’s a profitable business.”

Felix Batista, a Cuban-American from Miami, was kidnapped as he stepped outside a restaurant to answer a phone call in the northern city of Saltillo.

Drug gangs are blamed for hundreds of kidnappings in Mexico each year.

More than 5,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence between rival cartels this year.

Mr Batista is credited with negotiating the release of many kidnap victims.

He was in Saltillo, in Coahuila state, to offer advice on how to deal with kidnaps for ransom when he himself was seized last Wednesday, local authorities revealed on Monday.

Support for family

Charlie LeBlanc, president of Houston-based security firm ASI Global LLC, where Mr Batista is a consultant, said: “We have notified the FBI and Mexican authorities, and they are working on the case.

“We are offering our support to the family and hoping for the best.”

He declined to say whether the kidnappers had demanded a ransom.

The US embassy in Mexico City said it was investigating and would not comment further.

Hundreds of people are kidnapped in Mexico every year.

The number of victims has increased sharply following an army-backed crackdown on drug gangs, which has forced cartels to seek new ways of making money to fund their operations.

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Google has for years been one of the loudest advocates of internet neutrality, the practice of giving all internet data traffic the same level of priority.

However, the Wall Street Journal today reveals that the company, which now incorporates Youtube, wants to set up its own fast track on the web.

The precedent this would set would be to allow companies to pay internet providers for preferential treatment.

Smaller companies, businesses and websites could be left operating in the internet slow lane, unable to compete with the elite of the corporate world.

Defenders of net neutrality say this would constitute a form of censorship and maintain it would kill off the level playing field that has forged the greatest technological advance in human history.

Such a move may inevitably lead to a situation further down the line where a few large companies have a monopoly over online content and distribution.

Ironically, Google has positioned itself as a strong advocate of net neutrality and has often found itself on the receiving end of charges of freeloading from providers.

The company has responded by saying the report in The Wall Street Journal is “confused” and has reaffirmed its support for network neutrality.

Instead, Google explained that the OpenEdge effort (the subject of the WSJ story) was a plan to peer its edge-caching devices directly with the network operators so that the users of those broadband carriers get faster access to Google and YouTube’s content, reports GigaOM.

However, the company did not deny that it was seeking to get its packets ahead of others in this instance by paying internet carriers.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

The founding principle of the world wide web was that it is a decentralized communication medium born as a “neutral network”, there are no overriding controllers, as there are with television networks, to whose protocols users and content distributors must adhere to. This is what defines the internet as truly free.

Though Federal Communications Commission guidelines favor net neutrality, there is no concrete law that could stop carriers adopting the fast lanes, which appeal to them as a way of raising more revenue to upgrade their networks.

Indeed, the FCC rules have been weakening on neutrality for the past few years, allowing communications companies such as AT&T and Verizon to publicly acknowledge their intentions to create so called internet fast lanes. Other companies such as Comcast have been caught delaying internet traffic, in itself a form of prioritization.

Such moves by carriers, though much more subtle, are essentially no different to governments filtering and blocking content they deem to be sensitive or controversial, a practice now commonplace not only in Communist China but also throughout the so called free world.

The precedent to clamp down on internet neutrality also dovetails with the move towards the designation of a new form of the internet, of which we have consistently warned our readers, known as Internet 2.

This would be a faster, more streamlined elite equivalent of the internet available to users who were willing to pay more for a much improved service. providers may only allow streaming audio and video on your websites if you were eligible for Internet 2.

Of course, Internet 2 would be greatly regulated and only “appropriate content” would be accepted by an FCC or government bureau. Everything else would be relegated to the “slow lane” internet, the junkyard as it were.

The proponents of the various “Internet 2″ style projects all maintain that the internet in it’s current form is “dead” or “dying”, citing the problem of providing more and more bandwidth as it grows. The fact of the matter is that bandwidth is unlimited, as long as carriers are prepared to provide it, but the continuation of a neutral internet means less control and less profits for the corporate elite.

We are witnessing the first steps on a road of control and corporate centralization of the internet, a move to guarantee the internet serves the commercial and political purposes of large corporations. An internet without neutrality would be a direct attack on the right to information free of censorship or control.

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