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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."
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... :-/
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.
Ceiling cat now obsolete. Welcome copter cat.
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
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?
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)
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.
Considering that defense is a much more immediate concern than astronomy, I would say that the priorities are exactly correct.
That's not to say I don't wish we would spend more on space, of course. And military stuff does often get re-purposed like this, so the defense budget is not a complete money sink.
Something the size of Hubble is going to require a The Delta IV Medium+ or Delta IV Heavy given the need for a 5m payload fairing. In fact it's likely that these satellites are the reason for the 5m variants.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'll borrow this free topslot.
Seriously. The US budget division is bonkers, retarded and upside down. They secret projects have so much money just lying around that they can build two hubble-class telescopes just like that, and then figure out that they don't need them so they can hand them over to NASA, why don't they need them? Well, probably because they built something a lot better and launched it already.
Now consider then what else they're doing, and what say NASA could do with even a fraction of the money.
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!
Judging from TFA (I know, I know...)
They aren't quite built yet, and won't be ready for launch for another 8 years at least. Not sure how much of it is funded, or will be funded by anyone outside of NASA after the handoff.
I'm thinking it's an old (and likely over-budget) black program that didn't live up to its promises, that the USAF didn't feel like funding anymore, and so they wanted to find a graceful way to dump it.
IMHO though? Over the years, politics and politicians have shoved NASA's mission around back-and-forth enough to give it a permanent case of ADD. This only shoves it around more. I doubt that NASA really has much of a coherent mission outside of a few programs that have remained (thankfully!) largely untouched by politics.
I may be wrong about this, but seriously - if you were A VP, in a business that was founded sought out round widgets... only to have a succession of CEOs who pushed you towards finding square ones, then polyhedral ones, then only trapezoidal ones, and then square ones plus any green triangular ones you stumble across, but then someone gives you a detector specifically built for round ones?
Yeah... I wouldn't invest too awful much into any given new project either.
Almost be better off giving the dosh and gear to a more focused private industry/academia/whatever at this point. :/
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Plus, imagine how expensive maintenance is going to be without Shuttle.
The military's fleet of a total of 15 to date (4 operational, 10 decommissioned and one failed to reach orbit), doesn't get "serviced" by the Shuttle. Although they are similar in respects to the Hubble, none of them were launched by the Shuttle (they were launched by Titan-3Ds for the most part, a few with Titan-IV's and the most recent one with a Delta V Heavy), nor has the shuttle or ISS service them.
NASA tries to fix them, the NRO tends to make their satellites crash into the atmosphere when they reach their end of life regardless if its a design flaw or its just a old bird in the sky.
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?
Yea, I'd be upset. We have never re-purposed technology from war to peace before. It has NEVER happened except for, HUMV's, motorcycles, atomic energy, aerodynamics, satellites used for communications, GPS, LORAN, encryption, radio communications, computers, explosives, Helicopters, emergency medicine, phased array antennas, ceramics, semiconductors, jet engines, transport aircraft, and WD-40, just to name a few.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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
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.
It's kind of hard to launch something like the shuttle without everyone noticing. Otherwise, all bets are off.
If NRO can pull a couple hubble class telescopes out of petty cash, why are we so certain there isn't a Shuttle or the functional equivalent stashed somewhere?
Not exactly a functional equivalent, but... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
The secret projects have so much money just lying around that they can build two hubble-class telescopes just like that, and then figure out that they don't need them so they can hand them over to NASA, why don't they need them? Well, probably because they built something a lot better and launched it already.
Those two birds were built in the late 1990's and early 2000's - meaning, they are more or less 10 year old
In the span of 10 year time, NRO could have a generation (or two) newer birds with much better capabilities, already in orbit
Now consider then what else they're doing
NRO could have already pointed their newer birds out to the heavens and might already discovered something ultra-ordinary
But NRO being NRO, they just couldn't tell us what they have discovered, could they?
So... they did the next best thing - they "gifted" these two de-commissioned old generation birds to NASA, hoping that, with these birds, NASA could somehow stumbled upon the same ultra-ordinary things that NRO already discovered, so that the world can get to know about it
and what say NASA could do with even a fraction of the money
Judging from the performance of NASA for the past 2 decades, I doubt NASA could have done much, even if they were funded to the same level as NRO
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !