The DOD had two "better-than-Hubble" space telescopes just sitting around.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/06/hey-brother-can-you-spare-a-hubble-dod-sure-have-two/258061/

by pavel_lishin • 14 years ago

319 148 14 years ago

Can someone explain how two telescopes meant to focus on relatively close targets, without any cameras inside, are "better" than a Hubble? What metric are they using?

sp3327• 14 years ago

The lenses are just as big but they have a moveable secondary, which gives them better focus and 100x field-of-view compared to Hubble. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/nasa-g...

unreal37• 14 years ago

"With a Hubble here you could see a dime sitting on top of the Washington Monument." And these are better than that. And the DOD doesn't need them.

beambot• 14 years ago

I assume the NRO telescopes had their instrumentation removed before gifting the optics to NASA, yes? Or were they really just "blank casings"? Either way, it's kinda freaky to think that there are such powerful monitoring devices in space...

planetguy• 14 years ago

The "Which headline will give us the most pageviews by exciting moral outrage in our potential readership?" metric.

sp3327• 14 years ago

I think SpaceX should take one. Throw maybe $10k of off-the-shelf parts in there, add some comms, and you have the best proof-of-concept and advertising ever.

pavel_lishin3• 14 years ago

I think Facebook should buy one. I'm tired of hearing about nebulous data-mining aggregate privacy concerns; I want to be afraid of Facebook literally watching me, damnit!

gonzo3• 14 years ago

Google owns a satellite service, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyhole,_Inc) why shouldn't Facebook and Apple?

Tooluka• 14 years ago

Facebook should buy one and burn it down over their headquarters. Just because they can :) .

Mvandenbergh• 14 years ago

SpaceX doesn't have the capability to launch this kind of satellite and won't for another few years until they get their Falcon Heavy launch system working.

petegrif• 14 years ago

Good god.

mladenkovacevic• 14 years ago

It's interesting to think about how far advanced their equipment is now if this is their equivalent of "spare change" to throw at NASA

bradleyland3• 14 years ago

From Contact:

> "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?" - Hadden

For once, art has under-imitated the hyperbole that is our life.

moron• 14 years ago

Lumping it all under "government spending" is burying the lede a bit.

bradleyland3• 14 years ago

I'm not sure I follow. I'm not telling a story here, just pointing out a funny tie in from a piece of pop culture. There's probably something more subtle that I'm missing, because I'm dense like that :)

MiguelHudnandez2• 14 years ago

Building two is hardly twice the cost. The design and development work has surely got to be more costly than fabrication, assembly and installation.

Not that this nit-pick changes the nature of the discussion.

excuse-me16• 14 years ago

That's the point of the joke.

In the real world you can build two bits of identical high tech equipment for little more than the cost of one - in military procurement the normal rational rules of supply and demand don't apply

bradleyland3• 14 years ago

1) My comment wasn't meant as a serious critique of the situation

2) Econ isn't my forte anyway

C) You have my permission to stop being pedantic and laugh

D) I switched from numbers to letters, lest anyone develop the impression I am at all serious

:) When you make bullet lists like this, you can throw in a smiley emoticon and it will confuse at least a handful of people

6) Hope this made your Monday a little brighter :)

ytadesse• 14 years ago

I'm with you on this Brad. This is also the first thing came to mind.

molmalo• 14 years ago

Same here! I thought "Just like in Contact!!" :)

jakejake• 14 years ago

It would be interesting to see the two telescopes (or whatever device) that replaced these two.

There's probably a very limited number of groups that would be able to use this technology in a way that was agreeable to the military.

sakai2• 14 years ago

    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.”

Austerity notwithstanding, that's really a sad sign of the times (and state of science funding in the US).

jerf3• 14 years ago

There's no austerity. I don't even know where you'd get the idea there's some sort of austerity in the US.

NASA's problems lie elsewhere, mostly in the form of having a boss (Congress) who demands that they spend their money in mind-bogglingly inefficient ways, and then adds further inefficiencies by continuously jerking them around. Giving them more money won't solve this problem.

gizmo3• 14 years ago

Yep, austerity. See decrease in govt expenditures over time (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/the-secret-of-ou...).

Also, NASA isn't mind-bogglingly inefficient. Citation needed, I guess. Besides, their budget is a puny 0.5% of the federal budget, compared to 1% back in 1990. The return on science spending is, as far as I know, typically pretty good in the US.

The NASA budget outline can be found here: http://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html. And the complete 2012 budget report: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/516675main_NASAFY12_Budget_Estimates...

It all looks pretty reasonable to me.

damoncali2• 14 years ago

You're half right. I worked for NASA on Hubble. I guarantee you we were not living high on the hog. Holiday inn for 6 weeks at a time, cheapest flights for travel, cheapest everything. They balked at a $12 meal once when It was within an hour or so of a flight home once. We had trouble buying $300 hard drives at times (to run $100k software on). My engineer's salary was modest at best.

But yes, Congress makes all that "sacrifice" irrelevant due to the absurdity of their whims.

Another project I workded on: Al Gore literally had a dream one night, resulting in a colossal clusterfuck called Triana - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triana_(satellite). That's $100 million, wasted on a politician's fantasy of being able to see the whole sunlit side of the Earth. What would Musk have done with that money?

adventureful3• 14 years ago

I like the part where austerity means your spending goes up substantially, and or stays similar.

NASA budget:

1987: $7.5b | 1990: $12.4b | 1993: $14.3b | 2001: $14.1b | 2006: $15.1b | 2007: $15.8b | 2008: $17.3b | 2009: $17.7b | 2010: $18.7b | 2011: $18.4b

They're doing just fine.

zerohp• 14 years ago

Correct it for inflation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

Also, consider the fact that congress allocates the money going to individual project, not just the agency as a whole. NASA is not doing just fine.

robertpateii• 14 years ago

You should have calculated for inflation. Without it, your numbers appear misleading.

7.5 billion in 1987 is the equivalent of 15.1 billion today.

So they've had no effective increase in budget. Which helps us to choose the right question: Are they doing more today than they were doing in 1987? And what could they do with more budget?

sakai2• 14 years ago

Since many have commented on the term "austerity" (and that I implied that NASA is undergoing austerity measures), I should clarify that I only meant "the general political sentiment that austerity is a GOOD thing notwithstanding, it still sucks that NASA can't (culturally) buy a bottle of champagne when they complete a $1.5bn project".

Apologies for popping the austerity genie out of the bottle.

Jabbles• 14 years ago

Would they be any use as ground-based telescopes?

geuis• 14 years ago

Probably not. The design of telescopes face different environmental challenges between Earth-based and space. On Earth, we have the benefits of accessibility but the downside of peering through the atmosphere. In space, there's no atmosphere but you have to deal with inaccessibility, extreme cold, micrometeorites and space debris, and radiation.

Also take into consideration mirror size. On Earth, we have built (and are building) giant mirrors many meters across. In relation, the mirrors on Hubble and other space telescopes are rather small in comparison. Its really the lack of atmosphere that provides most of the advantage to space-based installations.

gonzo3• 14 years ago

well that, and the CCDs love cold.

jimhefferon2• 14 years ago

I worked on the Hubble (my dad was systems manager for Perkin-Elmer's bid), on the ball bearings. They are literally the ones that were rejected from the spy sats.

The spy sats bought a bunch of ball bearings (these might be a foot in diameter and are speced to be extremely low noise at low turn rates). They tested them all (using a phono needle resting on the outside of the bearing while it was slowly turned). The ones that made the least noise went in the sat while the others were sealed in a plastic bag and put on a shelf in the clean room.

I was told that when Hubble came along, the US no longer had the capability to make those (I'm not sure if that was true). In any event the ones that went in Hubble were the least noisy of the ones that had sat on the shelf. My summer job was (largely) testing to see which was the best. A cool job.

dmlorenzetti• 14 years ago

In a product design class, the prof asked us to draw the distribution of resistors in a bag of, say, 5-ohm resistors, bought from a local electronics shop.

It turned out that a normal distribution centered at 5 ohms was not quite right. It was a normal distribution, but with a deep notch taken out right at 5 ohms. All the resistors that tested to very close tolerance had been bagged separately, and sold at a higher price.

(The context was why you might want to put, say, four 5-ohn resistors in series, rather than just use one nominal 20-ohm resistor.)

juiceandjuice2• 14 years ago

I hope your product design class covered error propagation, because one 1% 20 ohm resistor would still be cheaper and more precise than 4 5% 5 ohm resistors.

raverbashing2• 14 years ago

Apparently you can take an off the shelf resistor and 'tune it' by sanding the exterior, so to increase it slightly.

But of course it's better when the tolerance doesn't matter (or only of a few components)

bane• 14 years ago

how heavy were the bearings?

jimhefferon2• 14 years ago

I remember them as being between the weight of a pack of cards and that of a dinner plate. I don't believe they were titanium - I'd guess they were stainless. Again, perhaps 10-12 inches in diameter and nothing in the middle; they were just the two races and the balls in between. For the fine guidance sensor.

gouranga2• 14 years ago

That's what you now know about. They are probably quite primitive devices if they let you find out about them.

From real experience, the commercial and public space programmes are positively infantile compared to the black project space programmes.

guelo• 14 years ago

> From real experience

Did you just violate your security clearance?

gouranga2• 14 years ago

No. I worked on unrelated things that blow up and kill people (no more!). Lots of black holes with big obvious scary pieces missing. Drawing assumptions doesn't violate clearance. Speculation is allowed.

Some things don't fit into normal technology progression.

waterlesscloud4• 14 years ago

And part of the little psy-war game that no doubt played a role in the decision to turn these over to nasa instead of letting them rust in some warehouse.

jpxxx• 14 years ago

Sadly, I'd imagine all those super toys are designed to point at Earth - different design requirements than for looking outwards.

nobleach• 14 years ago

That's what has me curious. The Hubble isn't designed to point at earth and would be of little use if we tried. Why does the US Military have telescopes that are on par with Hubble? Are they looking out into space as well? Why would they do that?

CWuestefeld3• 14 years ago

This was the first thing I thought about when I read the OP. There's room for a ton of differences in the telescope design, like what wavelengths the sensors are looking for. And how the scopes can be maneuvered and aimed.

There's no reason to think that these would be NASA's dream telescopes, even if by some definitions they are more advanced instruments.

ams6110• 14 years ago

Are drones replacing space telescopes?

This sounds like a reasonable speculation to me. Drones would be orders of magnitude cheaper, more manuverable, expendable, not as subject to being obscured by cloudcover, able to survey many places at once or swarm over a wide area, etc.

jackpirate2• 14 years ago

But we can't fly drones over China and Russia like we can Pakistan

jessriedel• 14 years ago

You can if you make them small enough. I don't think any of us know what the classified state of the art is.

blhack• 14 years ago

Uh...look at this thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnR8fDW3Ilo

This is made by Festo, a German industrial automation company. They did this for a trade show.

It was "for fun".

Imagine what we're capable of building for spying on China. I doubt we're having problems with it.

excuse-me16• 14 years ago

And satellite surveillance is less useful these days.

1960s - we have photographed Soviet SAM sites around Moscow. We know where to avoid to send bombers in.

2010 - we have photographed a semiconductor fab in china. We don't know what they are making but we can tell where the fab is to an inch.

juiceandjuice2• 14 years ago

cloudcover and atmospheric distortions.

mturmon• 14 years ago

Nowadays, you use adaptive optics to correct atmospheric distortions. Consider this January 2012 press release:

http://www.nps.edu/About/News/NPS-New-Home-for-Giant-Segment...

("National Reconnaissance Office Deputy Director Air Force Maj. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski [...] officiated at the unveiling of the Naval Postgraduate School’s latest high-tech research and teaching acquisition, the agency’s Segmented Mirror Space Telescope. The Naval Postgraduate School is the proud new home for the Segmented Mirror Space Telescope (SMT), designed and developed for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) as a technical demonstrator and experimental testbed for cutting-edge space imaging technologies.")

These instruments are making single-mirror telescopes (like the ones described in TFA) obsolete.

dfc• 14 years ago

Drones cannot do long term monitoring.

erikcw• 14 years ago

My understanding is that drones are preferred for long term/constant monitoring. Spy satellites are not placed in geostationary orbit, so they only have a few minutes of exposure per day to a place of interest as they fly over.

The Global Hawk [1] drone is optimized for high altitude loitering. Operating multiple drones in the area is one way to overcome the problem of running out of fuel.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_RQ-4_Global_Ha...

codezero• 14 years ago

Before we get all excited about this, I want to point out that part of the costs of any space mission, which are included in the budget figures you usually see are both the launch and the maintenance and post-launch operations for commanding the satellite and analyzing the data.

Just having two satellites sitting about isn't really that shocking, nor is the fact that the DOD has technology that is more advanced than Hubble, Hubble was originally funded in the 70s, slated for a launch in 1983, and finally launched in 1990.

johngalt• 14 years ago

More proof that defense gets a lake of cash for every bucket that NASA gets.

Optically I'd think looking down at a relatively bright earth would be a much different task than looking up at a very dark universe. Also field of view is much less important.

Fizzadar• 14 years ago

If only the worlds combined military budgets could be directed towards a global space (/science) program. Less investment in death and more in the future of human kind.

DividesByZero• 14 years ago

It's more difficult to profit from scientific exploration than it is from weapons and the maintenance contracts that come with them. The military industrial complex has a stranglehold due to simple market forces.

jcnnghm• 14 years ago

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.

Edit: 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.

excuse-me16• 14 years ago

There isn't a fully functional flight spare of Hubble sitting in bubble wrap waiting to fly. There is a mockup of the Hubble structure and there were flight spares for SOME optical components and some parts of instruments. The mockup is to train astronauts on instrument swap outs. Many of the instruments and the current solar panels aren't even Nasa builds

The "better than hubble" telescopes are old keyhole era spy sats, this is the design Hubble was originaly based on. It's also partly the reason for the original Hubble screw-up.

The contracts for Hubble went to companies that had experience building 2.4m mirror space telescopes (nod+wink). But security walls in the suppliers meant that the people who had build these spy sats didn't work on Hubble or pass on their knowledge - then oversight of the Hubble build process was hampered by security concerns that meant NASA QC engineers never got to see the mirror being built.

A few other points.

The cost of the Hubble 'airframe' was a small part of the space telescope cost, compared to the launch and service missions, the building of the STSci and the 1000 of professors, postdocs, researchers and students that it funded. Just the cost of storing it in a clean room for 3years after Challenger was estimated at more than raw commercial build cost.

The JWST isn't just a better Hubble it's a completely different concept - actually designed as a scientific instrument rather than compromised by being a spy sat design built to justify the Shuttle launch - as HST was.

nessus424• 14 years ago

I have to second this. I worked on two NASA space telescopes (both X-ray telescopes), and although we had on the ground something like the telescopes that were flown, the equipment on the ground was not flyable, and if the launch rocket had blown up, we would have been SOL.

In fact, some of the folks down the hall from me had a telescope they were working on fail to deploy properly after launch due to the canister containing the telescope not opening. There was no spare telescope--they had to start over from scratch.

astrodust3• 14 years ago

So it's these telescopes that were the entire reason for the shuttle program in the first place, wasn't it? The conventional rockets could launch satellites of most sizes all day long, but something the size of the Hubble required a vehicle with a large "mysterious payload" capacity.

Does this explain the Buran as well?

Natsu• 14 years ago

I wouldn't complain too loudly. Otherwise, next time, they'll quietly dispose of such things, rather than risk public backlash.

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

"Better-than-Hubble" is flat out wrong here, the only correct interpretation is "with larger apertures than Hubble", but there is so much more to a telescope, especially one in Hubble's class. A spysat is optimized for taking only exposures lasting a fraction of a second, for example, whereas Hubble is optimized for taking exposures that last many minutes at a time, with guidance that keeps Hubble pointed in the same direction to sub-pixel precision.

Let's take a moment to walk down the aisle with the label "Current Hubble Science Instruments". First, we come upon WFC 3, a 4k x 4k high quantum efficiency CCD imager with a wide field of view, spectral coverage from the near-UV through visible spectrum and with 63 different narrow and wide-band filters. Oh, and with a set of grisms and prisms for taking spectra, and with a separate 1k x 1k IR sensor with 17 of its own filters. Next up is NICMOS, an IR imager and spectrometer with a spectral range of 0.8 to 2.4 microns, this instrument alone places Hubble into the rankings as one of the top 3 or 4 most productive and capable Infrared telescopes in history all on its lonesome. Then there is STIS, a 3 CCD sensor with coverage from far-UV through near-IR wavelengths which is capable of taking high resolution spectra for 500 separate points simultaneously while also taking a full frame image, this instrument alone is responsible for much of all of the astronomical observations in the UV-range throughout all of history. And there are several other equally impressive instruments I have not mentioned.

The point is, none of these instruments or capabilities are going to be on a spysat. And they make up the vast majority of the value of a space based observatory. If a space telescope was nothing more than a big mirror, some guidance, and an imager then we could save billions of dollars, but they are so much more than that.

ars2• 14 years ago

Did you read the actual article?

It's just the telescope (the mirror) - it doesn't include the cameras.

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

That's my point. These aren't "better than Hubble" telescopes, they're just optical assemblies. That's more than nothing but it's hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment short of a Hubble equivalent observatory.

luke_s• 14 years ago

I honestly don't know the answer to this, so perhaps somebody can provide some info: Does it cost more to produce the mirror or to produce the various CCD imagers and science instruments?

It would seem to me that the CCD's should be cheaper - we have a LOT more experience producing CCD's than we have producing 3 meter mirrors capable of being launched into orbit. Surely the huge amount of research being put into producing low noise CCD's for cameras and phones would have the effect of making it easier and cheaper to produce the science instruments for a space telescope?

sp3327• 14 years ago

NASA reps said the satellite itself and the optics are the most expensive and time-consuming parts of the project.

smackfu2• 14 years ago

It's not got a mirror flaw that you need to work around which loses light, and the secondary is steerable. So the optics are definitely better than the Hubble we have. Just taking those instruments you mention and putting them on this NRO bird would give better results than the Hubble.

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

Maybe you missed what I was saying. Those instruments are the heart of what makes Hubble a world-class observatory, and they are far from off the shelf components.

DigitalSea• 14 years ago

Now I see why the government is in so much debt. Building something they already had two of, saving potentially billions in research & development creating another telescope. This is ridiculous. What else have they got two of just "sitting around"

gonzo3• 14 years ago

because the KH-12s didn't work as designed?

lifeisstillgood• 14 years ago

I've just worked it out.

Years ago I went to one of my first programming conferences , sat in the same room as GvR and Stroustrop and had one of those what am I doing here moments. But it was an amazing revelation - hundreds of people way smarter than me all of whom chatting where the side conversations and corridor chats are always more interesting and informed than the set talks

HN is just like the corridor outside the worlds biggest tech conference. The door bangs open and someone is talking about space and suddenly you realise there are actual rocket scie fists standing in ear shot.

I used to want to write scintillating blog posts and bump my karma score. But that happens in the main hall. Not in the corridors and I think I am happier here, like a young guy open mouthed that brilliant people actually like explaining stuff and it's beginning to make some sense...

hexagonal4• 14 years ago

You're already wiser than Walter Bright.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3061222

Kelliot• 14 years ago

'Second, if the DOD didn't need these two birds, which are both better than any civilian telescope, what do they have?'

This line worries me the most, hubbles pictures of things thousands of light years away are spectacular. Imagine what a better scope could so pointed at earth 300 miles below!

pvarangot2• 14 years ago

Not too long ago there was this diplomatic incident in my country where the US military forgot to mention they where bringing (or tried to smuggle in) a briefcase with some GPS equipment and other stuff. They where discovered when their plane was inspected and the briefcase was not in their customs declaration.

They where forced to open the briefcase, which was less than 1 meter (3 feet) wide. They agreed only if the briefcase was opened under a roof, alluding it was standard procedure because of spy satellites looking at its content.

That was when I realised that spy satellites currently have ridiculous amounts of optical resolution I had never though equipment could achieve in orbit.

excuse-me16• 14 years ago

They can't. The diffraction limit of a 2.4m (HST/KH) mirror from their orbit is around 6cm, the practical limit with an atmosphere is around 10cm.

However the photo-recon interpreter guys are amazing. They can look at a 1m resolution image of a vehicle made up of half-a-dozen blurred pixels and say "that's the new mkII whatever - you can see the extended wheelbase from the length of the shadow"

rdtsc• 14 years ago

Can you fly lower? You'd have to fly faster but wouldn't that be one way to increase resolution?

Tichy• 14 years ago

"However the photo-recon interpreter guys are amazing."

Amazing in identifying what is actually on the picture or amazing in giving politicians what they want?

pvarangot2• 14 years ago

Can't they be using bigger telescopes? The James Webb Space Telescope is declassified technology and has a self-assembling 6.5m mirror.

I'm not sure how atmosphere is optically taken into the equation, but maybe having a mathematical model of it can be used to increase the 10cm practical limit... sort of like with heat shimmer binoculars.

rsanchez1• 14 years ago

Yes, in case you didn't know, the DoD operates a secret space program completely independent of NASA and with an unknown budget.

mironathetin• 14 years ago

Define "better".

If these telescopes have to be equipped with instruments, what is left? The optical system? Thats nothing compared to the instruments.

Better in terms of optical system would mean an order of magnitude at least. This is obsolete, more or less, because ground based instruments come closer to a proper correction of atmospheric turbulences. They are cheaper to build and cheaper to run. The next generation optical space telescope may be a very long baseline interferometer. This cannot be build on earth.

Infrared is also a space domain. Thats why Herschel, ISO, Spitzer and James W. Webb are space telescopes.

The DOD had two "better-than-Hubble" space telescopes just sitting around.

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