Posted on 06/04/2012 10:00:18 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
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 ..
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.
The scientific community had made the dark energy telescope its top priority in the latest “decadal survey” of goals in astronomy and astrophysics.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I'll be seeing you in all those old familiar places..
The fact that NRO is giving them away means they don’t need them. So they probably have something better already in place.
drones.
Might've been guaranteed during the cold war. Now, I'm not sure you can trust the bureaucrats that much.
Drones don’t have the same level of detail.
Isn't that racist?
In a rational world that would certainly be true.
Obama looking for his roots?
The newest gadgetthingycameras use multiple tiny lenses like a fly has multiple lenses.. miniaturization of flyball technology advances at leaps and bounds,, the wonders of the Black Hole Budget.
There’s nothing mysterious about dark energy. A large mass of it exists at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Well that’s just ducky. How are we supposed to lift them into orbit and deploy and service them, now that Obama’s retired our shuttles?
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