NASA gets two military spy telescopes for astronomy

reply to post by OblivionGate

I was wrong about the function of the secondary mirror. It seems that the telescopes may be the type which was mounted on the KH-11 satellites. The purpose of the secondary mirror seems to be more of an aiming feature.

If the military was using these telescopes for checking out girls on the beach, doesn't it mean that the focal point would be way off that needed to use them to look into space? I feel retrofitting them could be expensive and maybe even impossible without changing the whole tube. Then again, maybe NASA wants them for looking at girls on the beach or watching football games and they don't have to do anything.

OK so, the Hubble if pointed at the Earth could see a dime on Mt Washington. Not that amazing. These satellites are if NASA could have kept developing the tech. These are military space program Hubble tech evolutioned technology. Same hardware basically like resolution wise but they can be used with different types of cameras. Think about the other abilities as well. It's pretty awesome and yeah the shadow space program is like 30 years a head of the world.

reply to post by KillThePoor

the Hubble if pointed at the Earth could see a dime on Mt Washington.

No.
If pointed at Earth the Hubble would have a resolution of about 30cm. That would not resolve a dime.

The quote from NASA's Michael Moore was: "With a Hubble here you could see a dime sitting on top of the Washington Monument."

The question is, where is "here". NASA headquarters perhaps?

The telescopes are not in space.

Both are grounded in storage.

NASA can't afford to shoot them up into space.

Wasn't like 75%+ of just the Space Shuttle's missions classified? Those crafts were military launch vehicles, they had more to do about looking down and controlling the air then doing anything for outer space.

Can you imagine what technology is truly out there now?

Just imagine the real mobile phone the president gets!

Derek