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NASA Gets Two Military Spy Telescopes For Astronomy
First time accepted submitter SomePgmr writes "The U.S. government's secret space program has decided to give NASA two telescopes as big as, and even more powerful than, the Hubble Space Telescope. Designed for surveillance, the telescopes from the National Reconnaissance Office were no longer needed for spy missions and can now be used to study the heavens."
I have two military spy telescopes and one recon plane IN MY PANTS!!!111twelve
FP...
I mean -KD
They are sitting in a cleanroom in upstate New York. There is a longer, more detailed article in the New York Times. The satellites may save $250M each or more on various NASA missions, but they still need to be launched and have a program built around them — which may put dark matter research more than a decade ahead of schedule.
For the folks who don't know what the National Reconnaissance Office is, the NRO is the member of the US Intelligence Community responsible for designing, building, launching, and maintaining the United States' intelligence satellites. It does not do intelligence work itself, nor does it direct the use of space assets. Judging from some of the comments on the NYT article, I should also say this: NRO has been around for a half century, and its existence was declassified two decades ago, so this isn't some kind of "new"/shadowy intelligence agency. While its work is classified, its purpose and function is well-understood.
For a look at what kinds of work NRO does, see
Declassified US Spy Satellites Reveal Rare Look at Secret Cold War Space Program
Twenty-five years after their top-secret, Cold War-era missions ended, two clandestine American satellite programs were declassified Saturday (Sept. 17) with the unveiling of three of the United States' most closely guarded assets: the KH-7 GAMBIT, the KH-8 GAMBIT 3 and the KH-9 HEXAGON spy satellites...
Secret No More: Spy Satellite Designer Reveals Life's Work
Phil Pressel had kept a secret for 46 years. A secret that he shared with no one, not even his wife, since he first went to work for the Perkin-Elmer optics company in 1965...
Aside: I know this is difficult to comprehend for some on slashdot, but US intelligence assets in space are almost exclusively used for FOREIGN intelligence. Occasionally capabilities of, e.g., the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) may provide civil support in natural disasters. Our intelligence operations are not transparent, and are kept secret to deny our adversaries knowledge of our techniques, capabilities, sources, and methods. Be happy that we're able to repurpose for science intelligence assets that might otherwise have been destroyed or kept secret beyond all usefulness.
Of course I noticed the mistake right as I posted it... :-/
So what earthward facing telescopes more powerful than the obsolete yet more powerful than hubble telescopes are watching me poo?
This translates to "we have far cooler spy stuff now".
But, and here I demonstrate how little I know about satellites, would something designed for looking down at Earth be easily adapted to astronomy?
You'd think the optics/instruments would be optimized for a different problem set.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The CEO did a good interview on 60 minutes last night.
of what could happen if we spent more on useful, scientific space programs instead of spending it on military. Think of how many missions could have been launched if we did that. How much more we could have learned about the universe.
NASA has a fully functional copy of Hubble "sitting around" at Goddard Space Flight Center as well. If something goes wrong in space, fabrication of replacement components and the training of the astronauts that will fix it does not occur in space. It is invaluable to have an exact duplicate on the ground for this reason.
Interestingly, the total 2010 US Space budget was $64.6B. The entire rest of the world combined spent only $22.5B. NASA's 2010 budget was $18.7B. Many programs that people think are NASA projects are actually defense projects. For example, the GPS system is not included in NASA's budget, it's spearheaded by the Air Force Space Command, and comes out of the Defense budget.
Chances are the main satellites that these are duplicates for have been decommissioned, so these are no longer needed. I would guess they are actually two distinct but similar designs, and not two copies of the same design. I would assume NASA already determined that the risk of these satellites failing and NASA being incapable of fixing them is outweighed by the desire to have higher powered telescopes in space.
My mother has worked in the thermal blanket lab at Goddard for years. Several years ago, she got one of the engineers working on the James Webb Space Telescope to take her and I on a tour of the clean room where they are fabricating one of the core components, the micro-shutter array. The micro-shutter array is an array of 65,536 shutters on an area about the size of a postage stamp. We got to go into the clean room and see the entire process. It is very similar to the process used to fabricate semiconductors, and I think they were operating at about the 60nm level. The idea of the micro-shutter array is that each shutter can be independently operated to shut out interfering light sources, so that the telescope can look much further back in space and time for deep fields. These should be spectacular. Instead of imaging the entire shutter area as the Hubble does, JWST will be able to close all but one micro-shutter which should allow very long exposure times, and the ability to see extremely distant objects. More on the array at http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/microshutters.html.
Also, the Hubble is huge. It is a cylinder with a diameter of perhaps 15ft and a height of roughly 40ft. Pictures really don't do it justice, I had no appreciation for the size until I saw it. I know my mother did some of the thermal blanket fabrication (think the tin-foil looking stuff on the outside of spacecraft) for Servicing Mission 4. Disclaimer: This is a cross-post of something I wrote at Hacker News earlier today.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
Nice to know we can afford to build spy satellites that we don't need. We have our priorities straight.
Easy, just put them on the next Shuttle flight. Ahhh, too soon? But seriously, will these fit on Dragon?
Should I be excited that NASA can use the hardware to move projects off the backburner or should I be depressed that NRO is so well funded that they are building toys they don't really need? Now that's the kind of news that can give you bipolar disorder. How can people who have been pinching NASA's pennies for years now can justify secretly building not one but two Hubble class telescopes for which they have no use?
This really goes to show you the budget humans have allocated to watching/killing each other vs. the budget allocated for exploring the deepest reaches of outer space. Military comes first, science gets the scraps.
Back in the early '80s, the NRO had extra "black projects" money, because its satellites were lasting longer than the design goals, so they didn't need as many. So they used the extra money to build a really nice campus near DC. Congress found out only after it was completed, and had a small cow.
I imagine that that is exactly what these were, spares that were never needed. As other commentors have noticed, they probably are obsolete, and since they don't have any instruments, are probably very adaptable to astronomy.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
How disgusting it is that science projects have to scrape for money, and when something like Hubble is launched it is heralded as cutting edge technology finally arranged and afforded. But the whole time, the REAL business of the US, military and economic domination of the world, has been sucking up vastly more funds and producing more advanced technology for ITS use.
Remember that the next time you feel inclined to get all rah rah about some NASA project announcement or technology success.
I hate this fucking country.
As this NASA HUbble document says "changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites." Hubble and KH-11 were apparently shipped in much the same container (suggesting they're physically pretty similar) and both were integrated at Lockheed's Sunnyvale, CA plant. Given that there are only so many US aerospace contractors able to work on either project, there will have inevitably been some degree of cross-fertilisation between the two. I imagine when the NASA guys get a look at their new toys they'll find it slightly familiar (the way they wouldn't at all if they'd been given two empty Russian equivalents). And when they put out to tender the work to get the things integrated and working, they'll probably end up employing the same people at Loral and Lockheed and Ball who who would have done the same work had these two gone to be recon birds.
I couldn't resist.
The nytimes.com article states that:
"For now, the two telescopes and some spare parts are still in their clean room at ITT Exelis, in Rochester."
That facility is the former Space Systems Division of Kodak. Who, according to declassified reports ( http://nro.gov/foia/declass/collections.html ), was deeply involved with CORONA, GAMBIT and and HEXAGON. Since it was a profitable division, it was sold off to leave all the loss making parts of Kodak owning the toxic waste site.
It's amazing to see what the US government can do for science when they allocate a very small portion of the defense budget to NASA.. How advanced would technology be today if it spent all of those trillions of middle east war dollars on research?
Damn scientists, perverting military tech for their inhumanly-focused aims.
How would you feel, if you were a contractor who worked on one of these satellites and who always assumed it would be used for some kind of warlike purpose -- maybe even to locate someone or something which needs to be blown up -- only to discover your work was going to be used for peaceful purposes?
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
There are some secondary characteristics of the mirror that may be less than perfect for optical astronomy. The Hubble mirror was ground smooth enough to focus the Lyman Alpha spectral lines of neutral hydrogen (best way to see H2 gas clouds). These wavelengths are in the UV. Presumably an earth-looking satellite won't have much use for UV, but it might be better at IR, which is also useful in astronomy. Also in service of the short wavelength goal, the Hubble primary mirror was made of a very exotic glass with near zero thermal coefficient of expansion. The mirror has glass stiffening braces in back that were *welded* on; no annealing necessary. Presumably spy satellites rarely have multi-hour exposure times, so thermal stability may not be so necessary. On the other hand, it sounds like the spy satellite secondary mirrors are adaptive optics. This is good for correcting for atmospheric distortion, but it needs a bright source (earth based scopes with AO use lasers to create a bright source high in the atmosphere for distortion correction). Perhaps the AO can be used to correct for thermal changes to the primary; I don't know...
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
It wouldn't hurt for NASA to send out a general message so all named and unnamed agencies could check their overstock list.. who knows, perhaps there's a Mars lander or two in there as well.
The UV capability of Hubble was nice, but for looking into the early Universe - the current focus of research (understanding the Big Bang; understanding dark energy and dark matter) it is useless - everything of interest has been red-shifted into the IR. The whole design focus of the James Webb Telescope is IR operation, that is why it will be sent far from that big glowing heat-ball called Earth (it will have a sun shield of course).
In longer articles (Washington Post, NY Times) they are proposing that these could be James Webb Jr. telescopes, providing some of its capability earlier, and then increasing the value of Webb by observing the "easy" stuff, leaving Webb to do what only it can do.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I can think of two reasons for this:
1. There is better equipment already in orbit.
2. There are no freedoms left to defend since the nations of the world have converged to the Chinese model.
When the Hubble was launched a NASA scientist was talking to a general. The general asked if he turned the Hubble around and pointed at the Earth what could it see. The scientist gave an example of how small an object it could see. The general responded "not Bad", not particularly impressed. The scientist thought to himself what could the military satellites do if he wasn't impressed? I think they are getting a little peak at obsolete military technology. Translated what could NASA do with practically unlimited funds.
Ladies and gentlemen: Why NASA never has enough money.
From junk to useful at the stroke of a pen. Science is always a loftier and more honourable goal than war.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
"Did somebody say Copter Cat?"
Blink. Blink.
Ooookay...
I agree. It seems we do have a space program. They just don't like sharing any details about it.
Why NASA never has enough money?
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The Hubble mirror was made with an improper null by Perkin-Elmer. At the time it was stated that a spare mirror made by Kodak was rechecked and found to be without this error. I suspect that the mirrors on these satellites meet the Hubble standard as there are reasons to use particular substrates and polishing regimens besides the reasons you mention. Polish is not some process where one can easily achieve some point on a continuum and stop there. The efforts to make a surface with low scatter in the visible may also provide a surface useful for shorter wavelengths. Simply put one will do the best work possible. The substrate used in the Hubble may be rare and exotic in terms of a typical US household but it is a common choice for space applications. It is stiffer and less dense than many other materials which is useful. Going from sun to shadow affects all optics in space where expansion and contraction can alter optical properties.
Police state.
Lest we forget http://www.stolly.org.uk/ETO
Since they were designed to look down on earth, lets turn them to the moon and get some really great images of the Apollo landing sites so we can shut those conspiracy theorist up once and for all.
Is nice to see the military giving something back to NASA, after the CIA screwed up hubbel's mirror.
what a beowulf cluster of Rasberry Pi would be good for.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
This is pretty much the rule of thumb for the huge observatories going up in Chile and what Hubble actually cost. You got manage the data and pay for scientists. These telescopes may be cheaper than Hubble because there is no repair capability at the moment.
Years ago, when I was in elementary school and the HST was being built, a group of us got to tour the Perkin Elmer facility where it was being built. By then, though, the mirror blank had already been ground, and wasn't available for viewing as it was off being silvered. A couple of other similar mirrors, though, were out and viewable. I asked what the other mirrors were for, since the HST would only need one. The tour guide, one of the engineers, stayed silent for a while, then asked us not to ask any more questions about those mirrors. In retrospect, of course, it's apparent these were mirrors for use on spy telescopes, and our guide was probably breaking some regulations just by showing them to us. Beautiful things, you could stand at the other end of the big room they were worked on in, and see yourself magnified perfectly, if you stood in the right spot.