NASA Moves Forward With Mission Using Spy Satellite Telescope (spaceflightnow.com)

NASA has formally approved plans -- a year ahead of schedule -- for an infrared space telescope launching around 2024 to record unique wide-angle views of the cosmos, seeking answers to questions about mysterious dark energy and searching for habitable worlds around other stars, the space agency announced Thursday. The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope is projected to cost approximately $2.3 billion and should operate for at least six years. WFIRST's centerpiece is a 7.9-foot (2.4-meter) telescope originally built to allow U.S. intelligence officials to spy on adversaries. Instead of turning the powerful telescope toward Earth for a clandestine surveillance mission, NASA plans to repurpose the hardware for cosmic research.

Comments

Langley

[WarJolt]

Something tells me Langley launched a better spy satellite and said "what the fuck are we going to do with this old piece of shit?" And then they gave the scientists a new toy. Aren't spies great?

Re:Langley

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically they had this device laying around on a shell and decided to give it to nasa because they don't need it anymore. They have enough of those in orbit already.

Think about that. For Nasa it is a big thing to have a Hubble-class telescope in orbit. The intelligence agencies have them lying on a shell as a leftover..

Re:Langley

[Richard_at_work]

Thats pretty much what happened with Hubble - its an adapted KH-11 design using much of the infrastructure the NSA set up for that program, with NASA having to supply the optics and support systems.

The NSA has also offered NASA redundant mirrors and systems that are pretty much identical to the Hubble layout but with better capabilities.

Re:Langley

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Wasn't the case of the Hubble a slightly less severe version of the same thing? If memory serves, it was substantially derived from the KH-11; and its spook origins ended up being the reason that the PerkinElmer got the job to produce the mirror, having done so for the KH-9s; and ended up beating out Kodak's(actually correctly shaped) mirror.

Re:Langley

[nojayuk]

One problem with the large-mirror spy satellites is that they can only look at one place on the ground in detail in a single pass since they only carry one large mirror. I suspect modern spy satellites carry multiple independently-targettable imaging systems with the ability to digitally combine images for higher resolution where needed on a case-by-case basis. This is similar to the way the largest land-based astronomical telescopes are now all multiple-mirror designs but without the requirement for on-the-fly reconfiguration during observation campaigns.

Re:Langley

[Solandri]

Doesn't work like that. You can't increase resolution by combining images. Only aperture works. So you cannot replace a large telescope with multiple independently targetable smaller telescopes.

You can combine multiple smaller scopes by using them as if they were part of the mirror of a large telescope (imagine covering up all of the mirror of a large telescope except for two spots near the edges). That makes an interferometer and gives you the angular resolution of the larger scope (assuming the smaller scopes are positioned near the edges of the mirror of what would be the larger scope - i.e. they still have the aperture of the larger scope), but the light gathering area of the smaller scopes. The light from the two scopes has to be combined optically though. The phase information is crucial (the two mirrors have to be aligned to a fraction of a wavelength of light).

Giving up light gathering area is not a trade-off astronomers usually want to make, but probably isn't an issue for spy satellites viewing targets bathed in sunlight. And there's been remarkable progress in the sensitivity of light sensors in the last two decades, so loss of light-gathering area probably isn't an issue for the spy satellite guys. That's probably what happened. The next gen spy satellites are probably interferometers using a synthetic aperture larger than the old 2.4 meter mirrors to achieve higher target resolution (the 2.4m mirrors were already good enough to resolve down to about 5 inches). And it was a waste of money for them to send up another spy satellite using the "older" technology, so they donated the components to NASA, where the light-gathering area might still be useful.

Re:Langley

[DanielRavenNest]

I worked for Boeing in the early 1980's, and our division supplied the carbon-fiber structure for Hubble. Hubble's optics and instruments were new, but the *spacecraft* (all the other parts) were derived substantially from spy satellites. When our guys visited Lockheed during the spacecraft integration, they saw *four* high-bay clean rooms, one of which was being used by Hubble. One of our engineers asked if they (Lockheed) had done this before, and the Lockheed guys just smiled and didn't say anything. Obviously they couldn't, because it was super-secret.

Note on the carbon fiber truss: This is what held the main mirror, secondary mirror, and the science instruments in place. They didn't want them to move when the telescope came in and out of the Earth's shadow. Carbon fiber has a negative thermal expansion coefficient (it shrinks when it gets warmer), and the epoxy matrix has a positive expansion coefficient. With the right percentage of each, you could get nearly zero expansion. But "nearly" wasn't good enough. So we made a bunch of truss pieces, measured each one, then put together a set whose "nearly zeros" cancelled out. That trick worked out great. Somewhere I've got one of the scrapped pieces as space memorabilia.

Swords into ploughs

[Bearhouse]

Excellent! I wonder how much extra science could be done if the all under-utilised kit lying around in the world's militaires was donated...

Re:Swords into ploughs

[Tablizer]

Von Braun once said something like, "I don't regret designing (V2) rockets. What I regret is they were pointed at the wrong planet."

Seriously, am I the only one surprised?

[Ecuador]

Am I the only one surprised that the US intelligence has a bunch of space telescopes the size of Hubble? I mean, I get spy satellites etc, I did expect a lot of money to go there, but they have enough scopes THE SIZE OF HUBBLE to give away 2 of them like that? Perhaps they have even larger ones, and the HST that was made into a big deal about how expensive complex and unique it was, was never close to being the largest space telescopes, just the only one pointed at the right things?

Re:Seriously, am I the only one surprised?

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize Hubble itself is a modified government satellite, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#See_also

Re:Seriously, am I the only one surprised?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The details are easier to come by for the oldest gear(since they've had the most time to diffuse and in some cases have been formally declassified because they are obsolete); but there are a lot of spy satellite launches.

KH-1's had 10 launches, KH-2 7, KH-3 9, KH-4 26, KH-4A 56, KH-4B 17, KH-5 12, KH-6 3, KH-7 38, KH-8 54, KH-9 20. KH-10 didn't go anywhere; but kindly donated 6 72-inch optical mirrors to the Multiple Mirror Telescope. KH-11 superceded KH-10 and saw 16 launches. Information about 'Misty' and 'Enhanced Imaging System' is new enough to be... spotty. And those are just the ones with some substantial optical component that makes them a crossover with astronomy.

One thing to note, in fairness, is that pre-KH-11, these satellites actually used film, with various re-entry pods to send it back to earth for processing, so their missions were of necessarily limited duration. Only the more recent digital imaging satellites even have the option of long term operation, with mission lifespans depending on what orbit you want, whether anything goes wrong, fuel supply, and so on.

IC and NASA have always had a relationship

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at the early history of satellite reconnaissance
http://www.nro.gov/foia/declass/collections.html

From the early days, there has always been 3 prongs of the US space program: NASA is the public one with stated science goals, etc.; DoD has theirs which is a bit less public: ICBMs, Weather satellites, Communications; and then the intelligence community, which is very obscured.

The NSA had nothing to do with the KH-11

[wiredog]

Keyhole is a NRO operation.

Re:Langley and original Hubble optics

[Geoffrey.landis]

Wasn't the case of the Hubble a slightly less severe version of the same thing? If memory serves, it was substantially derived from the KH-11;

Partly. Perkin Elmer won the bid to make the mirror (in part) because they were able to emphasize their extensive experience in making mirrors of similar size for reconnaissance satellites. The telescope itself, however, and the satellite, weren't the same.

and its spook origins ended up being the reason that the PerkinElmer got the job to produce the mirror, having done so for the KH-9s; and ended up beating out Kodak's(actually correctly shaped) mirror.

And then, rather amazingly, after having presumably made the various KH-11 optics correctly, PerkinElmer somehow mysteriously did the main Hubble mirror optics wrong. I have always been suspicious of this...

No suspicion needed: the fact that their experience was in classified satellites was, to a large part, the cause of the problem: They had a null corrector tool for the Ritchey–Chrétien mirror, which, as it turns out, they did not have the right expertise to use. Since all their mirror experience was in classified projects, they had a strict corporate culture of "don't talk to anybody, ever, about anything." So, instead of asking questions, they basically experimented around with it until they thought they knew how it worked, and didn't talk with anybody about it in any way.

Ironically, if it actually had been a mirror for the reconnaissance satellite, instead of a different (and publicly available) design, they would have already had the tool.

Re:Duration and cost

[Martin Blank]

Remember that Spirit and Opportunity were expected to operate for at least 90 days. There's the conservative estimate for how long something should last, and there's how long it actually lasts after the mission starts.

There is work being done on the maintainable infrastructure, but it's mostly being done by private companies like Bigelow.