With a lack of meaningful rural groundwater management legislation getting signed by the governor this session, lawmakers appeared to not have been quite ready for SB1221 (basin management areas; appropriation). The bill was pushed for a vote on the House floor just before sine die on June 15. It failed with some Republicans absent for the vote and Democrats opposing the bill. Dunn said during a Friday Joint Legislative Ad Hoc on Water Security meeting that bill supporters didn’t try to rush the bill, but they needed to show stakeholders the progress of negotiations throughout the session in the form of legislation before sine die. “If I was a betting man, I thought we’d be voting the budget this week, this weekend,” Dunn said. “It wasn’t trying to rush it past anybody. Water is bipartisan. It should be bipartisan. We’ve got legislative language now that we look at, that we can continue to work with moving forward. That was a big reason why we needed to get it done that Saturday to get it in front of people.” SB1221 would have allowed the designation of a basin management area in the Gila Bend, Hualapai Valley and Wilcox Basin either from the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources or approval from at least 10% of registered voters in a BMA’s service area. The bill outlined entitlements for water use in a BMA for industrial, municipal and irrigation users and proposed guidelines for appointing a BMA council. “It’s the closest we’ve been to rural groundwater regulation in 44 years,” Kerr said. “We’re still committed to working out a solution and to continue to work on this effort.” Arizona Farm Bureau President Stefanie Smallhouse said the bill went through a lengthy negotiation process and there were many concessions made from the original legislation introduced in January, including the petition threshold requirement of designating a BMA from 15% of voters to 10%. Another contentious point was the makeup of a BMA council, Smallhouse said. The governor’s office proposed a retention election for council members and removing a term limit requirement, which Smallhouse said was a “huge concession.” “The concessions that we made in this will determine the future of many farms in the state of Arizona,” Smallhouse said. “If you go and tell them they gotta conserve 10% more, they’re going to call it quits and they can be a medium-sized farm but with inflation today, that's enough to put you under.” Griffin said she didn’t want to put anyone out of business with whatever legislation is advanced in the future. Fernandez said Senate Democrats introduced 29 bills that were assigned to NREW but only one was given a committee hearing. “I would like to see more bipartisanship here in the Senate,” Fernandez said. “There are a lot of ideas on both sides of the aisle and some of those might be helpful.” Shope referenced SB1172 (physical availability credits; water supply) among the several water bills vetoed by Hobbs, which proposed to allow a person who owns land with an irrigation grandfathered right within an active management area to permanently retire the land from irrigation use and retain a physical availability credit. He also said he didn’t believe the governor’s office negotiated “in good faith” during the session on water legislation. “I hate to say you’re not going to get anywhere close to any type of EPA federal air quality standards, especially in Maricopa County where you’re taking in all of Pinal County’s dust,” Shope said. “(SB)1172 is a perfect example that if you believe in actual science, there's no way you could’ve been opposed to that bill. We have a lot of work to do.”

Farnsworth wants to revisit 2014 changes to DCS Despite the scrutiny the Department of Child Safety faced this session, Farnsworth said he did not think dismantling the agency was the solution, unlike other lawmakers. Rather, he thought the TTMC could work together to find legislative solutions to the missing children issue, to no avail. Farnsworth added “missing children” to the title of the Senate Transportation and Technology committee at the start of the session in hopes that the panel would take aim at the function of DCS. The department’s most recent report provided missing/abducted children data through the end of April. DCS reported 21 missing children as of April. “The issue is what we did in 2014, was trying to divide the needs from the family to the needs of the child,” Farnsworth said. The agency was created in 2014, removing it from the Department of Economic Security and placing it under the governor’s office. Though Farnsworth said reversing the decision would not “automatically fix the issue,” he said recentering the conversation would be a start. Farnsworth meets with DCS every Thursday. “They're taking steps to strengthen things, but I was not aware that progress has been made,” Farnsworth said. Additionally, Farnsworth said he believes the new CEO of DCS, David Lujan, is a “sincere person” and the solution is not to scrutinize the agency but to work toward reforming the agency’s operation. The agency was ultimately granted a four-year continuation when Hobbs signed Ch. 143, Laws 2024 (HB2447 – Child safety; department continuation; procedures) in late April.

The Senate Democrat Chief of Staff Paulino Valerio is taking a temporary leave of absence to join President Joe Biden’s campaign for reelection. Valerio will return to work at the Senate in November, according to a post on X.

WASHINGTON – Arizona Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly announced RAISE grants, totaling $39,458,216, awarded to the City of Douglas and Valley Metro Regional Public Transportation Authority for transportation projects. Sinema and Kelly both ensured their bipartisan infrastructure law increased the RAISE grant program’s ability to invest in Arizona projects.   The transportation projects range from expanding the existing Valley Metro Streetcar in Phoenix and much-needed improvements to pavement resurfacing, pedestrian facilities, safety countermeasures, traffic circulation solutions, and drainage improvements – increasing safety, efficiency, and accessibility in Arizona communities.   “I wrote our bipartisan infrastructure law to help everyday Arizonans build better lives – and I’m proud of delivering this increased funding for RAISE grants to increase safety, efficiency, and accessibility in Arizona communities,”

said Sinema, co-author and lead negotiator of the bipartisan infrastructure law.   “Thanks to our Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Arizona families are benefiting from historic investments in transportation infrastructure through the expanded RAISE grant program,” said Kelly. “This investment will improve transportation systems, create jobs, and boost economic development. Today’s announcement represents a significant milestone in our ongoing efforts to repair and expand vital commercial transportation infrastructure in Arizona’s border communities, as well as public transportation in the East Valley.”   RAISE – Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity – grants are awarded based on applications from local municipalities, allowing the Department of Transportation to invest in road, rail, transit, and port projects that promise to achieve national objectives. Sinema and Kelly both ensured their Infrastructure Investment and Jobs law included increased funding for RAISE Grants, helping to boost Arizona infrastructure projects for years to come.   Complete list of RAISE grant recipients:    

TUCSON, Ariz. — The sun barely peeks over the horizon as a suitcase-like transport box exits Steward Observatory, home to the University of Arizona Department of Astronomy. Inside, held snugly in place by foam, is precious cargo: CatSat, the university's first satellite built entirely by students. After loading it into the back of the car, Shae Henley and Walter Rahmer, both engineering students at UArizona, stretch one last time in preparation for the 660-mile trip from Tucson to Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Their mission: Deliver the satellite and fit it inside a Firefly rocket that will launch into low-Earth orbit as early as June 30. If everything goes according to plan, CatSat will orbit around Earth every 95 minutes, gathering data about space weather while using an inflatable antenna from FreeFall Aerospace and a state-of-the-art radio from Rincon Research Corporation. CatSat is a small satellite, also known as a CubeSat. The project kickoff was in 2016. For the past several years, students suited up in lab coats, hairnets and masks to meticulously wire up the satellite inside a clean room in the university's Drake Building. Henley and Rahmer were part of the CatSat integration team, which also included team leads Hilly Paige and Del Spangler, both UArizona alumni, and engineering student Sarah Li. The main body of CatSat, known as the "bus," is a commercially available part, explained Chris Walker, a UArizona professor of astronomy and principal investigator of the CatSat project. "It's like the spacecraft's heart, lungs and power – but you have to put in all the instrumentation yourself, wire it up, program the spacecraft and test it," he said. "The students did all of that." CubeSats are modular; in other words, they consist of standardized components. Consisting of six 10-by-10-by-10-centimeter cubes, CatSat is roughly the size of a large cereal box, enclosing a space of 366 cubic inches. The wiring inside of CatSat is densely packed together, making for a tight fit. "It's kind of like sitting on your suitcase trying to get it to close," Walker said. The compactness of CubeSats has its drawbacks, said Henley, the CatSat team's lead integration and testing engineer. Henley is an aerospace engineering major who has been working on CatSat since her first year at UArizona. "CubeSats are popular with universities because they're a great way for students to get experience with small spacecraft and do science at relatively low cost," she said. "But while the technology can be shrunk down with miniaturized components, the size of the antenna can't break the laws of physics, and therefore there are size constraints. Our solution to that challenge is an inflatable antenna." Made of Mylar, a thin yet durable material, the inflatable antenna addresses mass and complexity issues faced by conventional antennas, said Walker, the father of the inflatable antenna concept used by CatSat. "With an inflatable antenna, you can pack a 10-foot antenna inside a 2-foot space," he said. "Making such a large antenna using conventional design, you'd have to engineer it somewhat like a folding umbrella – it's much more complicated and more likely to fail, on top of having more mass and being more expensive." The idea for CatSat originated from a demonstration of an inflatable antenna developed by FreeFall Aerospace, a Tucson-based UArizona spinoff company co-founded in 2016 by Walker and Doug Stetson. UArizona aerospace engineering graduate Aman Chandra, who now works at FreeFall, contributed to the original CatSat proposal and has been the lead mechanical designer throughout the project. As a graduate student, Chandra designed and built CatSat's novel inflatable antenna system, which will be demonstrated for the first time in low-Earth orbit on CatSat. In 2018, the FreeFall team successfully tested its inflatable antenna at 160,000 feet on a NASA high-altitude balloon launched from a NASA facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, which took it to the edge of space. This milestone paved the way for the next technology aboard CatSat. Service to the ham radio community Before deploying its "beachball-looking antenna," CatSat will use a whip antenna to study Earth's upper atmosphere. "Once the inflatable antenna is deployed, it will increase drag," Henley said. "Even though we're in low Earth orbit, there's still some residual atmosphere in that part of space. That's why there will still be drag due to the inflatable antenna's larger size. So, we want to get some good ionospheric data beforehand." The CatSat team is interested in investigating how signals propagate through the ionosphere, one of the uppermost layers of Earth's atmosphere, depending on factors like space weather and the time of day. "The ionosphere is made up of different layers of charged particles, and density and height of the layers change over time," Walker explained. "These layers are created by solar radiation, electrically charging – or ionizing – air molecules, and that affects radio transmissions around the Earth." Of particular interest to the researchers is the so-called terminator, the line between night and day, as a means of examining how the ionosphere fluctuates because of changing solar activity and, by extension, the effects on amateur, or "ham," radio signals. "Radio wave transmission is affected by the time of day because particles in the ionosphere get charged by the sun's energy," said Walker, himself a ham radio operator. He explained that high frequencies are typically used during daytime, while lower frequencies are preferred at nighttime. "Seeing the transition from day to night and how it affects ham radio is really kind of cool," Walker said. Ham radio satellites have a long history, going back to the early 1960s, not long after the launch of Sputnik, the first orbiting satellite. For decades, ham radio satellites have eased the process of ham radio communication by acting as "steppingstones" that refract radio waves as they travel through the atmosphere. CatSat can also receive and transmit high frequency radio signals, allowing ham radio users to "talk" through the satellite. "In the ionosphere, the path of radio waves can be bent back toward Earth by charged particles," Walker said. "They can do multiple hops by reflecting off land and sea, like a stone skipping across water. That's how I'd be able to talk with someone from New Zealand from my house in the Tucson foothills." How well radio waves move around the world depends in no small way on conditions in the ionosphere, which can vary with solar flux and are part of a field of research referred to as space weather. CatSat measurements are expected to advance this field. The satellite uses a high-frequency deployable whip antenna to collect signals, which are sent to and processed by a radio on board the spacecraft called AstroSDR, provided by Tucson-based Rincon Research Corporation, a company that provides support for the CatSat experiment and the satellite's ground station at the University of Arizona Tech Park. Ham radio satellites today are used by a worldwide community of operators for communications, technology development and ionospheric propagation studies. CatSat will join the ranks of no more than 20 operating ham radio satellites. "We are providing a service to the global ham radio community," Walker said. To further benefit the ham radio community, the CatSat team plans to make the results of its experiments publicly accessible to amateur radio operators looking for data on ionospheric conditions. Following a successful launch, CatSat is expected to gather data for six months to a year. Students involved with CatSat come from several different majors, including astronomy; optical sciences; aerospace and mechanical engineering; electrical and computer engineering; systems and industrial engineering; and computer science. The students on the team said they cherish the project, as CatSat is completely different from theoretical coursework. "For me, it's been the most helpful thing at university," Henley said. "Classes are nice and give you a solid math and physics background, but not necessarily hands-on experience." Already, the team is looking into what they could do next with CubeSats, this time a little farther from Earth. One idea involves a CubeSat orbiting the moon (LunaCat); another would use a CubeSat as a data transmitter for a Mars mission (MarsCat). To help make these plans a reality, in May the team received a 3U CubeSat valued at  about $500,000 from GOMspace North America, who donated the spacecraft to the CatSat team for a future mission. CatSat itself uses a GOMspace spacecraft bus, and this donation aims to guarantee the continuation of the university's student satellite program. With experiments awaiting in Earth orbit and beyond, even the sky is not the limit for CatSat. "CatSat is definitely more Earth focused," Henley said. "But an inflatable antenna has a lot of potential, even for deep space and longer, farther missions."