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This is not quite true. These telescopes were built by the military to look at things a few hundred miles away, not millions of miles away, so the optical dimen
by bryananderson 9y ago
This is not quite true. These telescopes were built by the military to look at things a few hundred miles away, not millions of miles away, so the optical dimensions are different. They are still useful, but they are not clones of Hubble.
Furthermore, they lack the expensive part: the one-of-a-kind scientific instruments. These will still have to be developed from scratch.
NASA is developing one of them into a telescope called WFIRST, and by some estimates, little to no money will be saved by using the donated military telescopes.
- adventured 9y ago> NASA is developing one of them into a telescope called WFIRST Yes, the Trump Admin just tried to kill that. Correct me if I'm wrong, the NRO telescopes are just as powerful and capable as the HST as telescopes, the difference is the field?
- bryananderson 9y agoBasically, yes. The mirror is the same size as Hubble, and the field is much wider. However, there are some technical differences that make it less useful for imaging extrasolar planets and the most distant galaxies. Details are harder to come by, as this is ex-military hardware, so certain things are still classified.
- InclinedPlane 9y agoThe NRO instruments are just optics, optics make up a tiny fraction of the cost of a space telescope. NASA was not gifted fully functional space telescopes they could just launch and then start observing. They still need all of the components to actually turn them into functional instruments, spacecraft systems, cameras, attitude control, etc. The estimated cost for WFIRST alone is $3 billion, only slightly less than if the instrument had been built from scratch, if at all.