[MP-Ryan]

You can't make this stuff up:  http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/06/hey-brother-can-you-spare-a-hubble-dod-sure-have-two/258061/

NASA's been wracked by budgetary concerns as it tries to figure out how to do research into the origins of everything *and* loft human beings into orbit with big rockets. In particular, the space agency has been dealing with cost overruns on the next-generation Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, which have been eating up the science budget.

Now, we get word from the Washington Post that the Department of Defense has gifted two better-than-Hubble telescopes to NASA. That's right. Our military had two, unflown, better-than-Hubble space telescopes just sitting around. This story is almost unbelievable; it feels like a hoax. But it's not.

[Ghostavo]

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

[General Battuta]

Come ON sheeple, wake up. DoD has been using remote viewing since the eighties! Don't be fooled by JEFF BRIDGES and other media plants.

[StarSlayer]

Come ON sheeple, wake up. DoD has been using remote viewing since the eighties! Don't be fooled by JEFF BRIDGES and other media plants.

I think I'd rather have cold automated systems looking at Project Koschei than something as malleable and easily broken as a human mind.

[The E]

Project Koschei

+1 gold star for insider reference.

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

Weeeeeelll

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2154405/Secret-mission-accomplished-Americas-secret-space-plane-land-YEAR-orbit--knows-did-there.html

[Thaeris]

That's definately the future of short- or even long-term surveillance missions. Your conventional satellites are very limited in where or how they can be maneuvered after insertion. Now all you need to do is recover the unit and launch it into a different orbit.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Isn't it quite commonly known that the Hubble is basically an Keyhole KH-11 spy sat pointed the other way? And there's been several generations of spy sats since then. I bet there's quite a few assets up there that NASA would love to get its hands on...

[NGTM-1R]

KH-11 was better than Hubble. I remember the amusing discussions my father had on this subject where the NASA guys came to various optical labs in universities for help and they were like "well...we kinda can't do this, because there's a possibility our knowledge of classified information might leak into it intentionally or unintentional...but we'll give you a few little pointers...", and how something similar happened when they went to the NRO.

Besides, adaptive optics has really killed the near-infrared and visual light space-based telescope.

[NGTM-1R]

Actually, I take it back: there is one thing that Hubble has going for it in comparison to ground-based observatories, though given Hubble's relatively small size it's not clear to me it isn't illusory: it can take extremely long continuous exposures, up to 30 hours in some cases, while a ground-based telescope will have to space such a thing out over several nights.

Still, considering we've cracked the visual light adaptive optics problem (Palomar will be making the first active use of such a system at a major observatory for most of this week), even that's not an insurmountable problem.

[Nuke]

another point, what the **** did the dod need space telescopes for? alien invasion early warning systems?

[redsniper]

Protip: They had them pointing the other way.

[Nuke]

yea but it seems the optics for looking at objects hundreds of lightyears away would be different from optics for looking only a few kilometers. but what the **** do i know.

[Bobboau]

Come ON sheeple, wake up. DoD has been using remote viewing since the eighties! Don't be fooled by JEFF BRIDGES and other media plants.

[Trivial Psychic]

There was a story circulating back in the 90s that the reason for Hubble's initial optical problems was because its "incorrectly ground mirror" was actually ground to a spec for earth viewing.  The supposition was that the same facility was constructing a spy satellite for the CIA or the DoD or whatever acronym agency likes to spy on other countries and has deep pockets.  Anyway, the story continues to say that the mirror for the spy sat (whose funding was probably slipped into Hubble's cost overruns to hide records of its creation) was accidentally put on Hubble instead.

[NGTM-1R]

yea but it seems the optics for looking at objects hundreds of lightyears away would be different from optics for looking only a few kilometers. but what the **** do i know.

The goal of a big mirror is to gather light and push it at a discrete point. The distance of the objects being looked at isn't really material, as anyone who ever ran star parties on the deck of the Midway with a Dobsonian telescope can attest.

Because it would cloud out and you'd have to look at people having meetings in nearby buildings or people watching TV in the Hotel Del or things like that after having previously looked at Orion.

(hi)

A spy sat setup (everything, you put the wrong mirror in the wrong telescope design and you'll be lucky to get anything useful out of it) might give you a bad field of view and poor f# in comparison to an astronomical one (might, because I have no idea what their field of view and f# is like, and astronomy is all over the map on that anyways) but...that's not going to cost you image quality and can easily be worked around. Hubble's problem wasn't like that by all accounts.

[jr2]

I'd personally like to know if it would be possible to network all of the major telescopes that can have a lock on a specific object (or all telescopes with different times on exposure factored into the software) into one huge super telescope, if we really wanted to look at something; with a computer to assemble all of the images, and, given the slightly different angles of view, maybe get a little extra detail than would be possible even with an equivalent single super telescope.

Of course, I don't know about the maths behind this idea, so it may not be feasible at all.  Thoughts?  (Basically, use all of the telescopes like the compound eyes on a bug to get a better picture).

[Klaustrophobia]

those exist, and are called interferometers.  you get an "apparent" mirror size of the distance between the telescopes.  gives you the resolution as if you had a telescope that big, but not the light-gathering power.

[NGTM-1R]

AFAIK most (all?) interferometers require physical combination of the signal, though, so large ground-based models are usually impractical.

[The E]

The VLBA (granted, it's radioastronomy, not optical) disagrees

[NGTM-1R]

Okay, opticals then. I know that's true.

Keck 1/2 are probably the best active one in the world, they're set up for it, but good luck getting time on both at once. Palomar had one for awhile, but it's currently out of service;