Castoff NRO Satellites Have Better Telescopes Than Hubble; If Pointed at Earth ‘Can See a Dime Sitting on Top of the Washington Monument’
June 4th, 2012The way it was told to me back in the 1980s, by a guy I thought was nuts, was that, “A dime on the sidewalk was no problem,” for NRO.
Well, that’s pretty similar to what was just printed in the Washington Post today:
NASA official Michael Moore gave some hint of what a Hubble-class space telescope might do if used for national security:
“With a Hubble here you could see a dime sitting on top of the Washington Monument.”
The New York Times version of this story includes the following:
A spokeswoman for the National Reconnaissance Office confirmed that it had transferred equipment it no longer had any use for, but would not elaborate.
“This is not something we’re going to talk about,” said the spokeswoman, Loretta Desio, adding, “We’re hoping this becomes a NASA story.”
Yeah, no shit.
The black world wouldn’t want people to start wondering what else was bought with the missing trillions of dollars.
Via: Washington Post:
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 have 2.4-meter (7.9 feet) mirrors, just like the Hubble. They also have an additional feature that the civilian space telescopes lack: A maneuverable secondary mirror that makes it possible to obtain more focused images. These telescopes will have 100 times the field of view of the Hubble, according to David Spergel, a Princeton astrophysicist and co-chair of the National Academies advisory panel on astronomy and astrophysics.
The surprise announcement Monday is a reminder that NASA isn’t the only space enterprise in the government — and isn’t even the best funded. NASA official Michael Moore gave some hint of what a Hubble-class space telescope might do if used for national security:
“With a Hubble here you could see a dime sitting on top of the Washington Monument.”
NASA officials stressed that they do not have a program to launch even one telescope at the moment, and that at the very earliest, under reasonable budgets, it would be 2020 before one of the two gifted telescopes could be in order. Asked whether anyone at NASA was popping champagne, the agency’s head of science, John Grunsfeld, answered, “We never pop champagne here; our budgets are too tight.”
But this is definitely a game-changer for NASA’s space science program. The unexpected gift offers NASA an opportunity to resurrect a plan to launch a new telescope to study the mysterious “dark energy” that is causing the universe’s expansion to accelerate.
Err I don’t get it??
“NASA officials stressed that they do not have a program to launch even one telescope at the moment, and that at the very earliest, under reasonable budgets, it would be 2020 before one of the two gifted telescopes could be in order.”
launch even one telescope???
Aren’t they in space already..?!?!
Weird.
They hadn’t been launched yet.
2020! That’s longer than the time from Kennedy’s speech to the “moon landing”. Maybe they should hire SpaceX.
Strange… build two telescopes and don’t even put them into use… I guess that’s what governments are good at…
“First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?”
—S.R. Hadden