Ramesh Nathan was convicted of wire fraud and money laundering for scamming local investors, including veterans, with false claims about a fake space tech company and using their money for personal expenses.

A federal jury in San Francisco convicted Ramesh Kris Nathan, 43, on Thursday of six counts of wire fraud and two counts of money laundering after he defrauded investors with promises of futuristic space technology. According to Bay Area News Group, Nathan claimed his company, Relativity Research Fund, was developing spacecraft, propulsion systems, and robotics, boasting of worldwide offices, massive profits, and an upcoming Nasdaq listing. In reality, the company had no employees, operations, or revenue.

Between 2016 and 2017, Nathan took about $50,000 from investors — many of them military veterans — using false promotional materials, a fake company website, and an intermediary to lure victims. Instead of funding tech innovation, Nathan spent the money on personal expenses and overseas transfers to his mother and ex-girlfriend. Nathan was arrested in 2019 while trying to leave the US.

Prosecutors and the FBI said Nathan betrayed the trust of investors with "fantastic tales" and "science fiction.” He now faces up to 20 years in prison for each fraud charge and 10 years for each laundering charge, with sentencing set for June 13.

Image: Ken Lund/Flickr

Emphasizing the scale of the problem facing developers and residents, scientists with the European Space Agency last week announced that the tilt and sink of San Francisco's Millennium Tower is visible from space. The Business Times picked up the report, and noted that the agency was monitoring the San Francisco area as part of a study on subtle ground shifts in urban areas.

"The Sentinel-1 satellites have shown that the Millennium Tower skyscraper in the centre of San Francisco is sinking by a few centimetres a year," read the findings. "To probe these subtle shifts, scientists combined multiple radar scans from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 twin satellites of the same area to detect subtle surface changes - down to millimetres. The technique works well with buildings because they better reflect the radar beam."

A decidedly more high-tech approach than rolling a marble across an apartment floor, the image above depicts areas of little to no movement in green, with the colors yellow and red representing spots with higher movement. Zooming in on the high resolution image does indeed show two red spots jumping out of a sea of green at what appears to be the tower's location.

Originally named one of the world's top 10 residences, word of problems at Millennium Tower first came out earlier this past summer — with reports that the building had sunk 16 inches leading to a flurry of threatened lawsuits and attempts to shift blame. Developers said construction on the nearby Transbay Transit Center was to blame, while others questioned the decision to not drill down into the bedrock.

With the latest civil suit against developer Millennium Partners alleging that the city and the Transbay Joint Powers Authority conspired with the developer to hide information about the building's excessive settlement from potential buyers, the ongoing saga of the Leaning Tower of San Francisco is sure to drag out for some time.

Thanks to the European Space Agency, we now can watch the entire thing unfold from space.

All previous coverage of the Millennium Tower of SFist.

Green & gold multi-piece meteor just flew south of Bridgeport and the Bodie Hills, California #easternsierra pic.twitter.com/r2mMqNOPLW

— Jeff Sullivan Photo (@JeffSullPhoto) July 28, 2016

A bright light seen streaking across the skies of California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Colorado wasn't, as you might have hoped, aliens coming to deliver us from the mess that is 2016. In fact, in a revelation that's par for this year's course, it wasn't even a meteorite: It was trash. Space trash, but still, trash.

Witnesses reported seeing the lights flash across the skies of at least five western states at around 9:47 p.m. Pacific Time, sending them straight to various social media platforms for speculation, conspiracy-mongering, and blurry photos and video.

A spokesperson with the California Highway Patrol says that they received "hundreds" of calls regarding the lights across the state from people afraid that the blaze was an airliner in distress.

Others noted that the Delta Aquarids Meteor Shower was set to peak Wednesday evening, leading many to speculate that that was the fireball they were witnessing was a meteorite entering our orbit.

Speaking to the San Jose Mercury News Dylan Kuhlmann says that "Even after deciding it was a meteor, it was unnerving," Kuhlmann said.

"We all agreed that if the world wasn't ending, it was an awesome experience just watching it fly."

Speaking with ABC 7, Livermore, CA resident Bryan Fagundes says that "From the west sky we saw this shooting star coming across from the east."

"I thought about making a wish, but then it kept going. One of the neatest things I've seen in a while."

According to US Strategic Command spokesperson Julie Ziegenhorn, a Chinese CZ-7 rocket re-entered the atmosphere at the time the bright lights were spotted, but when contacted by SFist she would not confirm that the fireball was definitely the rocket, saying that we should "contact the Chinese authorities."

Jonathan McDowell, a scientist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was less circumspect, asserting that the lights were indeed that now-decaying rocket, reentering the earth's atmosphere in one last blaze of glory before its demise.

(McDowell, a prolific tweeter, goes on at length regarding the dead rocket. You can take in all his thoughts here.)

Spaceflight Now, which characterized the light show as "space junk from China’s newest satellite launcher," says that "the relatively slow speed of the fireball — it took nearly a minute to cross the sky — ruled out a natural origin."

If McDowell is correct in his estimates of the rocket's size of 6 metric tons, it's "among the largest objects to come back to Earth unguided over the last few years."

And by object, we mean garbage. beautiful, flaming space garbage.

Got to see the #SuperBowl in person after all! But at 17,500MPH, it didn't last long. #YearInSpace pic.twitter.com/O0DygOdX8i

— Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) February 8, 2016

In space, no one can hear you scream at the shitty turf.

#GoodMorning #sanfrancisco! Looking good this #Saturday morning!. #YearInSpace pic.twitter.com/iWg6rruCgj

— Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) September 5, 2015

Ugh, going back to work after a three-day weekend is somehow worse than going back after a normal one, am I right? And between people on Facebook/Twitter all "summer is over" and the many pieces of sad, irritating, or frustrating news we'll be bringing you today (trust me, there's plenty) I am having a hard time not feeling a bit deflated.

But now here's International Space Station operations branch chief Scott Kelly (look at his bio, it's mind-blowing) putting things in perspective, as he tweeted this lovely picture of San Francisco from space this weekend.

Look, there's both the bridges! And your house, and my house! Techies and luddites, homeless and be-mansioned, commenters and other commenters (you know who you are): we're all on this rock together, people. Remember that.

Hello #SanFrancisco! What a clear view of the Bay Area from #space, I think I can see the Golden Gate! pic.twitter.com/eNr7pDItH6

— Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) January 20, 2015

This far-out photo comes to us from Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. The picture of our region was posted Tuesday morning from the International Space Station.

It's pretty apropos when you think of an aside in President Obama's State of the Union Address last night. "Last month, we launched a new spacecraft as part of a re-energized space program that will send American astronauts to Mars. In two months, to prepare us for those missions, Scott Kelly will begin a year-long stay in space. Good luck, Captain — and make sure to Instagram it."

In the past, Cristoforetti has shot photos like this one of the Himalayas and other naturally stunning geographies.

A group of space enthusiasts in Mountain View, California, with cooperation from NASA, have taken control of a 36-year-old decommissioned satellite that was originally put into orbit to study solar weather. The ISEE-3 satellite was launched by NASA in 1978 and has not been in use for about 20 years — its battery died decades ago, but it was equipped with solar power and it just returned to Earth's orbit after many years floating in space and being forgotten. Now, as BetaBeat reports, via some crowdfunding and an industrious team led by former NASA employee Keith Cowing, the ISEE-3 has become the first civilian-controlled satellite which will continue to beam publicly accessible data of multiple kinds for the next several decades.

The ISEE-3 Reboot Project, which raised well over its $125,000 goal, now has a control center in an abandoned McDonald's in Mountain View near the Ames Research Center, which the team has named McMoon's. Google helped them build a website called SpaceForAll.com which shows off some of the capabilities of Google Chrome, and Cowing helped assemble the simple, relatively low-tech equipment needed for communicating with and controlling the satellite.

He also had some help from Bob Farquhar, one of the retired NASA researchers who originally worked on the ISEE-3 and knew that it could probably be brought back to life pretty easily. Getting back into Earth's orbit would turn out to be impossible, though, and they've put it back into orbit around the sun. It'll return to proximity to the Earth in 2029.

Their new control center, dubbed “McMoon’s,” fit all of the criteria they needed: the doors locked, and it was free. For their console, they pulled a broken flatscreen TV from a government dumpster and fixed the power supply. The other pieces are from eBay, including a Mac laptop and some radio parts.

With just those bare-bones pieces, they were able to MacGyver a computer-radio hybrid that made contact with the ISEE-3.

Once they were able to communicate with the satellite, they established a new orbit around the Sun, slightly larger than the Earth’s orbit. It’ll remain close enough to the Earth for a while, allowing the crowd-sourced community to run tests for a long time.

And on Sunday, August 10 at 2:16 a.m EST, the very first Interplanetary Citizen Science Mission took place, collecting data near the Moon with a simultaneous Google Hangout to watch the satellite's progress.

You can now watch a live view of the satellite's location at all times, and check out the data that it's collecting, which will remain accessible to anyone in the world who wants it. And here's an illustration of where the satellite's been over the past 36 years. Below, some video explaining the project.

Pretty cool.

[BetaBeat]
[UniverseToday]

If you can't wait until 2026 — the year SpaceX founder Elon Musk says he'll have humans on Mars (or won't be able to afford it when the time comes) — take a trip now via Google Maps.

As TechCrunch explains, you can zoom out of the Earth view in the latest version of Google Maps into a frame of stars that clicks into shots of the moon and Mars.

Here are the instructions via TechCrunch:

1. Go to Google Maps.

2. Click the Google Earth option.

3. Wait for the map to load in 3D and start zooming out as far as you can.

4. Make sure the Explore tab is open.

5. Once you've zoomed out, options for the moon and Mars should appear at the bottom of your screen.

You can also check out an annotated version of the map complete with Apollo missions here.

[TechCrunch]

If there's one thing we love more than perusing all the wonderful, but sadly low-altitude photos in the SFist Flickr pool, it's checking out our fair city from somewhere up in orbit. This photo, snapped from the International Space Station on July 3rd, shows the San Francisco Bay with the Central Valley, the Sierra Nevadas and all of the inconceivably vast firmament beyond. It's OK if you're a little dizzy.

To get your bearings: the Bay and the peninsula are there along the coastline towards the bottom right. Lake Tahoe would be that blue spot just below the robot arm there. Pop on over to the Fragile Oasis flickr stream to blow this thing up big enough to see the silt in the Bay.

In sad, but related space program news today: Sally Ride, America's first female astronaut, passed away today after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer. She was 61 years old.

Previously: A Sunny Day in San Francisco, From Space
Hat tip to local blogger/stargazer Bluoz for the Flickr find.

Regarding that meteor that may or may not have struck the Earth near Lake Tahoe this past weekend, NASA now has a better estimate of just how big that flying chunk of colorful flaming space rock really was: Roughly the size of a minivan, except it was over 40 times heavier than your standard Plymouth Voyager (space joke) and it blew up over California's Central Valley with the energy of a 5-kiloton explosion.

According to the rocket scientists at NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the JPL in Pasadena, most meteors you spot zipping through the night sky are about the size of "tiny stones or even grains of sand." Big fireballs like this Sunday's range can be as small as a baseball or big enough to fit half your pee wee soccer team's starting lineup. Earlier reports guesstimated the meteor was about the size of a washing machine, so it's good to know how these things relate to everyday household objects, even if we are still kind of terrified one could come crashing through our roof at any second.

Anyhow, those folks who did get a glimpse of the meteor should consider themselves lucky. Events like this might happen about once a year, a JPL scientist explained, but they tend to happen over oceans and uninhabited wastelands, like the other 90% of Nevada.

Meanwhile, still no confirmed reports of space rocks actually raining apocalyptic hellfire on to the ground, so we can continue to rest easy about the doomsday predictions for now.

Previously: Meteor Reportedly Crashes To Earth Near Lake Tahoe, Fails To Obliterate All Of Humanity
[NASA]

Our sister site LAist informs us, via the Mars Phoenix Lander's Twitter, that water ice has been found on the planet Mars today. At around 5:15 p.m., NASA folks exclaimed, "Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!"

Martian discoveries soon to follow. Presumably. Read more about today's icy, outer space discovery here.