Honolulu Weekly

They held a meeting, and almost nobody came. When representatives from the U.S. Air Force, the University of Hawai’i Institute for Astronomy and development contractor Group 70 arrived on Jan. 23 at Kealakehe Intermediate School’s cafeteria to conduct their first ’scoping session’ on the proposed PanSTARRS 4 telescope, they waited half an hour for the usual crowd of angry Hawaiians and environmentalists to show up. This time, there were only a handful of people in the room.

The PanSTARRS proponents finally proceeded with their presentation anyway, pitching the new wide-angle array of four telescopes as a vital tool in the search for potential ‘killer asteroids’ that might strike the earth. Then, when the floor was opened to questions and comments, they learned the reason for the sparse attendance. Kealoha Pisciotta, a native Hawaiian and former telescope technician who heads the activist group Mauna Kea Anaina Hou, announced that her group had told its supporters to stay home. Similar calls had gone out from other groups, including the environmental coalition KAHEA, The Hawaiian Environmental Alliance.

The reason for the boycott was a lawsuit by Mauna Kea Anaina Hou and others, including the Royal Order of Kamehameha and the Hawai’i Chapter of the Sierra Club, to stop another Mauna Kea Project that would have built a string of ‘outrigger’ telescopes around the giant Keck I and Keck II scopes on the mountaintop. Siding with the native Hawaiians and environmentalists, Judge Glen S. Hara had ruled last August that the Board of Land and Natural Resources was required to approve a comprehensive management plan for the Mauna Kea summit conservation area before another telescope could be built, and that the BLNR had never ratified a 2000 plan proposed by the university. Hara reversed the BLNR’s decision to approve construction of the Keck outriggers.

Hara’s final order, issued only hours before, caught the IfA, Air Force and Group 70 by surprise. Some asked to see Pisciotta’s copy. After the meeting, one official remarked that it was ‘too bad we got blindsided by the court order.’

But Pisciotta, the Royal Order of Kamehameha’s Paul Neves, the Sierra Club’s Deborah Ward and others maintained that the IfA and Group 70 officials had known the judge’s ruling since August and that to move forward with the approval process on yet another telescope without a comprehensive management plan was, at worst, illegal, and, at best, a waste of taxpayers’ time and money time since hearings on the new telescope would have to be held again when a management plan had been approved. Pisciotta noted that community members had turned out for hearing after hearing for the Keck Outrigger proposal and other telescope-related meetings, often taking time from work or from family activities.

‘We could not ask them to come do it again, and we didn’t think we should be asked to,’ she said.

Neves was even more forceful.

‘It is very difficult to actually go through the process to get the people’s rights down, and then have a judge validate it, and then…after all of that, to hear the state law just be shunned,’ he said.

‘It is clear that project cannot go forward without a comprehensive management plan,’ admitted IfA Director Rolf-Peter Kudritzki. He contended that ‘These are two separate processes. One process is a state process. The other is a federal process. The spirit of the NEPA process is that we start a review… at the earliest possible moment.’

But from the documents provided, it was clear that the project was already very far along. A 105-page Environmental Impact Preparation Notice gave details about the scopes’ design, purposes and proposed location. The Air Force had already paid university scientists and contractors millions to design the hardware and software. A prototype scope, PanSTARRS 1, was due to be fully operational on Hualalai by the end of 2007.

Kudritzki claimed that ‘The university has already started a management plan,’ which drew a response from Ward, who is serving on the Environment Committee of the University’s Office of Mauna Kea Management, which was charged with laying the groundwork for the environmental component of such a plan. Ward noted that the committee hadn’t even issued a Request for Proposals yet to find a contractor to develop the plan.

Later, Ward said that in addition to the environmental component, a ‘comprehensive’ plan such as the one Judge Hara had required would also need a cultural and archeological component and must consider other elements such as the economic impact of the telescopes’ power usage. It would also need to include other possible stakeholders, such as skiers, hikers, horseback riders and RV enthusiasts.

The handful at the Kona meeting all spoke against the telescope. Only 11 people attended the Waimea meeting the next night, and many of those were the same ones who had showed up in Kona. Again, the proposal drew almost no support from the audience.

At Hilo on Jan. 25, however, the boycott sputtered. About 50 people showed up, but that didn’t change the project’s luck. Out of dozens of speakers, only one favored the project. The PanSTARRS proponents again were criticized for even holding the hearings.

‘Pushing PanSTARRS plans ahead of the summit-wide plan [is] out of step. It is an affront to native Hawaiians and people concerned about the environment. It may be illegal. And it may be a waste of the taxpayers’ money,’ said environmental activist Cory Harden.

Killer asteroids

PanSTARRS 4 stands for ‘Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System.’ The scope would be at the forefront of a revolution in astronomy. Most of the big telescopes on Mauna Kea use curved mirrors to gather as much light as possible in order to see as far as possible. But the bigger the mirror, the smaller the patch of sky it can see at one time. So big scopes such as Keck 1 and Keck 2, currently the world’s largest reflectors, are best used for looking at a single object such as a distant galaxy.

PanSTARRS would do just the opposite: examine huge swatches of sky to discover the relations of millions of objects to each other. To do this, it relies as much on digital electronics as on optics. PanSTARRS 1 combines a relatively small telescope (with a big range of view) with an advanced digital camera that has a resolution of over a billion pixels (one gigapixel). By comparison, a state-of-the-art consumer camera may have a resolution of ten million pixels (10 megapixels). PanSTARRS 4, the proposed Mauna Kea scope, would take in a field of view 70 times as large as the Kecks. By combining the data for the four telescopes, the new instrument would collect three times as much light as UH’s current 88-inch telescope, which it would probably replace on the mountain.

Data from the scopes would be transmitted down the mountain to a supercomputer in Hilo, which astronomers hope will be able to process the images within half an hour. Instead of vying for viewing time on the mountain, as astronomers traditionally do, the same information would be available to everyone to ‘data mine.’

At the scoping proceedings, Kudritzki pushed PanSTARRS’ ability to detect ‘near earth objects’ (NEO), asteroids that come within 1.3 astronomical units (AU) of Earth’s orbit. (One AU is the distance from Earth to the sun.) Occasionally, an NEO will hit the earth. Kudritzki displayed pictures of meteor craters in Arizona and Canada and alluded to the Yucatan collision that was believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. He estimated the odds of a serious asteroid collision with Earth in the next century to be one in a thousand.

But some opponents accuse Kudritzki of using scare tactics. One of the slides at the scoping hearing showed Earth hovering in a virtual cloud of thousands of asteroids. Kudritzki didn’t mention that the scale of the illustration grossly exaggerated the size of Earth and exponentially shrank the distance between it and the other objects; otherwise Earth would have been microscopic.

However, PanSTARRS could have huge value as a purely scientific tool. According to Nick Kaiser, who designed PanSTARRS 1’s optics, the scopes’ time-lapse photography could offer unique insights into the structure of the universe. The Milky Way galaxy is believed to be made up of smaller galaxies that were pulled into its gravitic whirlpool; by measuring the movement of stars relative to each other, PanSTARRS could reveal where those remnants ended up in the galactic structure. Those same relative movements could reveal more about dark matter, the mysterious substance that scientists believe controls the rate at which the universe expands.

Another use for the scopes would be to pinpoint phenomena such as novae (exploding stars) and notify the larger telescopes in time for them to slough their ‘big glass’ over to observe them (the ‘rapid response’ part of PanSTARR’s name).

In fact, this could increase the pressure to build even more big telescopes on Mauna Kea. In addition to displaced astronomers from the 88-inch scope seeking more time elsewhere, Kaiser believes, ‘PanSTARRs will detect so many of these things that there may not be enough big glass to fully exploit this.’

Militarizing the mountain?

But the PanSTARRS data may have another, more practical use that has some opponents worried that the mountaintop may be militarized. A telescope that could track NEOs could also track satellites.

‘Satellites are military eyes in the sky,’ wrote antiwar activist Jim Albertini, in a post-hearing e-mail. ‘The ability to track and know the precise locations along with the ability to destroy those ‘eyes’ is a key element of a blinding first-strike nuclear attack…GPS was a military development so that submarines could know their exact locations by getting a fix off the satellites in order to fire their missiles. Without the satellites, the subs and many other weapon systems are blind.’

At the hearings, Air Force and IfA officials maintained that the Air Force was merely the funding mechanism for the telescopes’ construction; that the telescope would be transferred to the university’s ownership and control after it was built; that it would not be used for classified projects; that the data from the scopes would be available for everyone, and that there would be no military officers on the mountain. The Air Force has other satellite monitoring telescopes, including one on Haleakala, and one Air Force official said that his branch of the service had determined that the new telescopes’ data would be, at best, only marginally more useful than data from existing sources.

Why Air Force involvement?

Three words: pork barrel spending.

One IfA official stated that university scientists had approached Sen. Daniel Inouye with a promising idea for a new kind of telescope. The official said, ‘Gee, this is high tech for Hawai’i, which you’ve been doing for years.’ The official noted that Inouye’s typical method of doing such funding was by adding budget items through the Senate Defense Appropriation Subcommittee. So, the Air Force found itself with a congressional mandate to administer funding for a telescope designed to hunt for killer asteroids.

Harden, however, pointed out that one Request for Proposals (RFP) to develop software for the project had called for applicants to have ‘the ability to work in a classified environment and hold secret clearances.’

‘With no classified data or research, why are there classified requirements for the project and company?’ Harden asked.

One Air Force official attempted to dismiss the RFP language as ‘boilerplate.’ But a copy of the RFP shows that there seemed to be a clear logic behind the requirement. The software in question was needed to identify ‘non-scientific objects’ that might appear in the data stream.

‘Non-scientific objects,’ Kaiser freely admitted, meant satellites. From an astronomer’s viewpoint, a satellite track was junk data that had to be eliminated before it confused the astronomical picture.

Knowing the orbits of classified satellites might help to develop that ‘junk detector.’ But an astronomer’s trash could be a general’s treasure.

Whether PanSTARRS data enhances first strike capability depends on what happens to the ‘junk’ that the PanSTARRS software filters out. If, as officials maintain, all the data will be in the public domain, then both sides can mine it for everyone’s satellite orbits. If the ‘junk’ is eliminated from the data stream before it’s released to anyone, including the Air Force, then nobody gets an advantage. Only if the Air Force gets it, and nobody else can, does it become a first-strike enhancer.

The main advantage that the Air Force may gain, however, could occur before PanSTARRS is built. The software and technology developed to make PanSTARRS work can obviously be copied and used to enhance the Air Force’s own telescopes. The Air Force could get everything it wants from PanSTARRS without ever setting foot on Mauna Kea.

Getting religion

DocumentaryMovie Muana Kea: Under Seige

The big telescopes devices designed to answer some of the same questions that any religion also seeks to answer: What are the origins of the universe? What are we made of? Where did we come from?

The problem is, the astronomers aren’t the first ones to use the mountain for such purposes.

‘Mauna Kea is a temple. It’s a house of prayer. Would they treat a Catholic church or a synagogue the same way that they’re treating our temple?’ Pisciotta wondered aloud. She noted that the temple served a holy function for ‘a lot of people, not just for Hawaiian people.

‘When you’re feeling in the gutter, and you’ve been kicked to the curb, you can go up there and feel relief and healing and deep profound understanding. That’s really the mountain’s gift to all of Hawai’i and the world,’ she said. But now the mountain had changed, she added, ‘It’s not silent, it’s not quiet, it’s not peaceful any more…People have shared for a long time, but things start going overboard, and ultimately, it’s impacting their ability to continue to practice.’

All of the telescopes now on the mountain were built without environmental impact statements (EIS). A lawsuit by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs finally forced NASA to conduct an EIS for the Keck Outrigger project, which it was funding. The study found that the previous telescopes had caused ’significant negative impact’ to the mountain’s cultural and environmental values. An endangered native insect on the mountaintop, the wekiu bug, had undergone a population crash. At the Hilo scoping session, one hiker noted that formerly pristine Lake Waiau, a short distance below the summit, was now ‘polluted’; other hikers have reported that the lake is green with algae.

A 1985 management plan capped the number of telescopes on the mountain, but loopholes were quickly found: were the Keck outriggers all part of one instrument, for instance, or were they many?

In 2000, the IfA came up with its own management plan and created the Office of Mauna Kea Management (OMKM), complete with its own rangers. But without the Department of Land and Natural Resources approval, said Ward, the OMKM has no legal authority and its rangers can do little besides hand out information.

The IfA has taken steps to assuage its critics with the PanSTARRS plan. The scope would replace an existing scope and would have a lower profile than its predecessor. The dome would be dark and reflective, rather than glaring white, to lower visibility. Group 70 put a native Hawaiian in charge of the project and hired two O’ahu kumu hula to handle Hawaiian relations and developed an ‘approach’ to integrate Hawaiian principles into the design process.

All of this rang hollow with local native Hawaiians, who asked why Group 70 was bringing in O’ahu kumu instead of a local one with ties to the mountain and why it had invented a new protocol instead of using the traditional ones.

The new hearings, held after Judge Hara’s ruling, seemed like the last straw. Not only was the IfA breaking Hawaiian rules, opponents charged, it wasn’t even obeying Western courts.

With tears in her eyes, Pisciotta described the death of a beloved kupuna, shortly after Hara’s August ruling.

‘Uncle Genesis’ last dying words were that we won,’ she said. ‘I will never ask my kupuna to do that again, but I will tell you this, sir, that anything else that is going to be done, it is going to be done by the process.’