NASA receives spy telescopes

The two space telescopes that the secretive National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has given to NASA are likely to remain grounded for the foreseeable future. A satellite incorporating one of the surplus spy telescopes will cost NASA between $1 billion and $2 billion to build and launch, according to Michael Moore, acting deputy director of NASA’s astrophysics division. That’s money the agency doesn’t expect to be able to find for years to come.

Each of the telescopes “would have cost us around $250 million,” Moore told reporters on 5 June. The optical components are “essentially perfect,” he said, with performance comparable to that of the Hubble Space Telescope but with a field of view up to 100 times greater. “We arguably could have produced these, but we didn’t have the scientific drive in that particular direction,” he noted.

The wide-angle feature makes the NRO telescopes well suited to become the major component of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. That telescope was ranked as the top-priority large space mission by the National Academies’ 2010 decadal survey of the astrophysics community; its main functions are measuring dark energy and searching for exoplanets. The telescopes’ “extraordinary field of view would allow you to see more supernovae, the classic way to look for dark energy,” Moore said.

A long way off

If cost were no object, 2020 would be the soonest that a spacecraft built around one of the telescopes could be launched, said Moore. A more likely launch date is 2025, after funding for development of the James Webb Space Telescope project has been freed up and becomes available for other projects, he said.

John Mather, NASA senior project scientist for JWST, expressed delight with the acquisition of the twin telescopes. Having the hardware in hand “saves a lot of thinking cost,” he says, and will make engineering the spacecraft a whole lot simpler. “The next challenge is to get the instrumentation built,” he says. The telescopes have been stripped of cameras and other instrumentation that would have been used for reconnaissance missions.

Moore said the NRO first contacted NASA in January 2011 to offer the telescopes. Neither agency would provide a photo of the telescopes, which have been declassified and in NASA’s possession since August 2011. Asked about how they happened to become available, a spokeswoman for the NRO would say only that they were “hardware that didn’t meet NRO’s intelligence needs.”

Located at an ITT Exelis facility in Rochester, New York, each telescope features a 2.4-m-diameter main mirror, mirror support elements, and a truss structure that holds a secondary mirror. Also included are systems to maintain temperature, an outer baffle, and doors that protect the optics from light.

The actual cost of a satellite will depend on the number of instruments to be included, the accuracy of its control systems, and other factors, Moore said.

NASA will be paying $75 000 to $100 000 annually to store the two telescopes.