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KH-11 spysat design revealed by NRO’s telescope gift to NASA (2012)

164 points by flyinglizard 6y ago

supernova87a 6y ago
You can tell from my username that I have some opinions in this area. My questions are these: NASA can barely keep JWST on a delayed schedule without massive cost overruns. What is another telescope good for? How many astronomers and support staff do we need in this industry? How do we measure and know that it's enough? What's the breakthrough that another telescope at the cost of $Bs would achieve? (and please be specific if anyone is going to reply, not just the old "because it's worth doing" argument -- that could justify any amount of spending) These are the things you think about after you leave a field and are not beholden to it any more.
- zrail 6y ago
  A new space telescope will not be subject to Starlink interference. SpaceX will be happy to launch it for you at very competitive prices.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    So that's the real purpose of Starlink, eh?
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      The real purpose is to offer planetary-wide 1 Gbit/s Internet access. Assuming SpaceX can keep up with the demand, this is definitely going to kill Iridium and probably all ISPs in rural areas where people these days are happy to have ISDN service (and I wish I were joking here). Also, given that a SpaceX sat dish is supposed to be the size of a pizza box which means incredibly hard to spot, it will open truly free (it will still be under the control/influence of the US government, though) Internet access worldwide... this is going to have a massive impact on China, North Korea and other countries where Internet freedom is severely restricted.
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  Some of us wants to see further than the local neighbourhood man, why you gotta be so salty? In any case it's not like NASA funds ground based telescopes, so I'm not sure what you would want to happen instead, just more rockets in space with blinkenlights to mess up the Rubin frames?
- justaguy88 6y ago
  If starship becomes a real-go-to-orbit rocket, the cost to put this telescopes up there will go down, and they can likely use larger heavier materials to make the telescopes themselves, also reducing the cost a lot
  - valuearb 6y ago
    Not sure why you are getting downvoted. The JWST is blowing through every possible budgetary limit because of the crazy lengths they have to go through to fold and unfold the sunscreen to fit a 4.5 meter fairing. Starship has a 10 meter fairing, so far less folding. It also can lift 5 times the mass of the Ariane 5, which would allow including heavier and tougher materials for the sunscreen (which has already torn once in testing), far more fuel for station keeping to extend its ten year life span by decades. Even better, Starships 10 meter fairing would allow launch an actual 6.5 meter mirror instead of one built out of 18 smaller segments. The reduction in complexity is immense. Lastly, Starship makes a JWST style observatory serviceable, even a million miles out at Earths L2 Lagrange point. That in itself makes for a longer life span, and regular upgrades, simplifying design decisions even more.
- flyinglizard 6y ago
  1. Broader observation spectrum (IIRC JWST is visible red to infra red) 2. Machine time for researchers (I don't know how congested Hubble is but humanity could use more than a single telescope) 3. Redundancy in case JWST goes up in flames and we're left without a space telescope
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    WFIRST is infrared and optical too, maybe there are a few nm and micrometers more or less in one or the other, but both are essentially covering the same wave lengths.
- dsl 6y ago
  > What's the breakthrough that another telescope at the cost of $Bs would achieve Neither will go to space. They are late-70s early-80s spy sats. This was a technology transfer so NASA could learn how NRO solved specific challenges they faced. There was talk at the time about one of them being sent up in 2024, but that hasn't even been discussed seriously in the last 8 years.
  - ngoldbaum 6y ago
    That’s not true, the bus and mirror will be used by WFIRST: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Field_Infrared_Survey_Telescope https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Field_Infrared_Survey_T...
    - dsl 6y ago
      WFIRST-AFTA keeps getting budget, and that budget keeps getting diverted to the James Webb Space Telescope. Two years ago they issued the first production contracts, targeting a delivery date of 2025. Now we are looking at putting 50 year old parts in to space, at best.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  > What is another telescope good for? My understanding is that WFIRST is more of a replacement for Hubble as it slowly dies (or suddenly dies at the end of a fiscal year due to $$$). However compared to both JWST and Hubble, it has a much higher field of view (the example that NASA gave at one point is that took the Hubble several years to survey the Andromeda Galaxy in IR. WFIRST could do that same job in a few hours). This has a lot of benefits if you want to do things like look for exoplanets. WFIRST will of course be very expensive, but for a number of reasons it is unlikely that it will be even close to the cost of JWST (like JWST it will be going to the L2 Lagrange point, but it won't have to make as many design compromises as JWST to get there) The last decadal survey of astronomers[1] determined that WFIRST was a #1 priority because: "...WFIRST will settle fundamental questions about the nature of dark energy, the discovery of which was one of the greatest achievements of U.S. telescopes in recent years. It will employ three distinct techniques—measurements of weak gravitational lensing, supernova distances, and baryon acoustic oscillations— to determine the effect of dark energy on the evolution of the universe. An equally important outcome will be to open up a new frontier of exoplanet studies by monitoring a large sample of stars in the central bulge of the Milky Way for changes in brightness due to microlensing by intervening solar systems. This census, combined with that made by the Kepler mission, will determine how common Earth-like planets are over a wide range of orbital parameters. It will also, in guest investigator mode, survey our galaxy and other nearby galaxies to answer key questions about their formation and structure, and the data it obtains will provide fundamental constraints on how galaxies grow. The telescope exploits the important work done by the joint DOE/NASA design team... and expands its scientific reach. WFIRST is based on mature technologies with technical risk that is medium low and has medium cost and schedule risk... WFIRST will complement the targeted infrared observations of the James Webb Space Telescope. The small field of view of JWST would render it incapable of carrying out the prime WFIRST program of dark energy and exoplanet studies, even if it were used exclusively for this task. The recommended schedule has a launch data of 2020 with a 5-year baseline mission. An extended 10-year mission could improve the statistical results and further broaden the science program. The European Space Agency (ESA) is considering an M-class proposal, called Euclid, with related goals. Collaboration on a combined mission with the United States playing a leading role should be considered so long as the committee’s recommended science program is preserved and overall cost savings result." >How many astronomers and support staff do we need in this industry? I'm going to be honest, this comes across as a bit of a loaded question. Obviously we don't "need" any astronomers at all (or most scientists for that matter). But more theoretical research can still have tremendous payoffs. I'm a big fan a letter[2] that a paperclip'd director at NASA Marshall wrote to a nun in Zambia who asked why the US spends billions going to the moon while children on Earth starve to death. >How do we measure and know that it's enough? I don't think humanity will reach a point in any scientific endeavor where we decide that it's enough and we don't need to understand any more. I suppose it would be when we have a complete understanding of the entire universe. [1]: https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/special-events/astro2010-astronomy-and-astrophysics-decadal-survey/ https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/special-events/astro20... [2]: https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/ https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/
- cryptonector 6y ago
  Well, this donation == lots of saved money. That's probably why NASA comes across as a bit less than grateful.
- mturmon 6y ago
  The WFIRST web page gives a good description: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/wide-field-infrared-survey-telescope-wfirst/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/wide-field-infrared-survey... There are 2 instruments. The coronagraph instrument (“WFIRST-CGI”) is a high contrast imaging test bed. If we want to have a technology path to image exoplanets, we need to test and improve the tech we have for masking the starlight of a target star, while allowing us to see the reflected light from a nearby exoplanet. For earth like exoplanets, this is a 10^10 brightness difference. WFIRST will hopefully get us to 10^8. To get there, you need deformable mirrors, wavefront sensing, and active control. We will also be able to get coarsely binned spectra from WFIRST. Spectra (in general — I’m not sure if WFIRST will get there) would allow us to detect presence of water absorption features in the reflected light. Eventually, we might be able to sense the oxygen A and B bands, which would indicate non-equilibrium chemistry.
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  > What's the breakthrough that another telescope at the cost of $Bs would achieve? Multi-messenger astronomy[1] seems to be the next big thing. Will we lose out if we don't have a good optical telescope "up there"? Or is the current crop of gamma/x-ray and IR satellite telescopes coupled with ground-based optical telescopes good enough? I understand adaptive optics and such has drastically improved the capabilities of ground-based telescopes, but for MMA (to hijack the acronym) are there any advantages of a space-based optical telescope? [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05833 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05833
- xxpor 6y ago
  I'll argue the other side of the "because its worth doing" argument: 10 billion dollars just isn't that much money. It's very roughly one Amazon Seattle campus or half of the cost of the 2nd Ave subway in Manhattan. People are lending us money for basically free, might as well spend it on fun stuff rather than blowing people up.
  - valuearb 6y ago
    $10B is enough to send over 100 astronauts to Mars for multi year stays. I’m guessing the science they produce will be much more actionable in the short run, and the reusable, orbital refuelable space ship used to transport them to Mars will also cut the cost of launching space telescopes by ten times.
dsl 6y ago
These were late-70s era KENNAN satellites. I wouldn't say they were "revealed" as much as they were declassified and donated. There have been 4 new generations of imagery platforms since, up to the current MISTY system that started launching in 1990.
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  Are you saying there are big innovations in the optics for the newer ones? I mean, we saw what the current capability was last year, and it that didn't seem like it's hugely better than the picture they put in the article.
  - dsl 6y ago
    Spy satellites aren't like camera phones. The killer feature isn't always higher resolution or being able to zoom in on a licence plate. Imagine having a big enough sensor and lens array to be able to see every individual boat in the Strait of Hormuz and track them all in real time. Or being able to pinpoint a spot on the planet and over the course of multiple passes by different birds, be able to construct a photo realistic 3D model of an oil refinery for a SEAL team to walk through in VR.
    - ThisIsTheWay 6y ago
      +1. The GEOINT and IMINT communities are investing heavily in multi-source collocation and automated analysis. In the past the focus was to improve resolution, now the goal is to improve the analysis of the images with additional data. Short wave infrared, synthetic aperture radar, creation and maintenance of digital elevation models, and frequent revisit rates to aide in computer/AI monitored change detection are all high priority. Great reading here: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/31/20746926/sentient-national-reconnaissance-office-spy-satellites-artificial-intelligence-ai https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/31/20746926/sentient-nationa...
    - RyJones 6y ago
      I attended Hack The Machine[0] in Seattle a few years ago. The amount of data the had for people to work on was amazing - the Navy provided a set of AIS data with some number of collisions in it; the challenge was to use your technique to find more collisions in the broader dataset. The guy said something like the Navy had 100% of AIS data going back a decade for us to work on, because of course they do. [0]: https://www.hackthemachine.ai/ https://www.hackthemachine.ai/
chunger 6y ago
I did not realize that the Keyhole line of spy sats had a resolution of 4" from 200 miles away! That tech is at least a decade old, so imagine what exists today.
- Afforess 6y ago
  You don't have to imagine. Trump leaked a satellite photo from a spy satellite last year. Wired has a great piece on it: https://www.wired.com/story/trump-tweeted-a-sensitive-photo-internet-sleuths-decoded-it/ https://www.wired.com/story/trump-tweeted-a-sensitive-photo-...
  - casefields 6y ago
    The president doesn't leak per se. He's the ultimate authority on classification, therefore by releasing top secret material he has declassified it.
    - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
      Trump disclosed something that he should not have done and wouldn't have done if he had a brain in his head. Not technically leaking is separate from something that did not help the country. It was a stupid action - of course not your point.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - flyinglizard 6y ago
        First, the picture was not released in full resolution. It was a photo of a print of a photo. Second, there is also value to letting your adversaries know what you are capable of. Just think of the hassle of hiding activities from a satellite like that - surely it takes a huge operational toll. No matter what, it sounds to me like releasing the picture is within the presidential oversight. He was not naming spies or anything.
      - 6y ago
xphosadria 6y ago
Look at those code names corona!!! This is clearly the source of the virus
NotSammyHagar 6y ago
I'd like to read more about the failure of Boeing to make the next gen after the Lockheed KH-11. Giant too big to fail Boeing is struggling with parts of the SLS and their version of a new human rated capsule for the space station. Being has many successes but also failures - yet I've never heard of this KH-11 successor failure?
- rbanffy 6y ago
  I don't think we would. Disclosure of non-readiness is a big no-no.
  - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    this was many years ago, so like the kh-11 details its not so sensitive. this is probably a management failure, perhaps on top of technical failures. So no details?
billyhoffman 6y ago
My favorite KH-11/Hubble story is that during the design of the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA originally wanted a 3 meter mirror. However when they began to design and budget the satellite they were quietly told they should reconsider and use a 2.4 meter mirror, as this would be significantly cheaper since they would be able to leverage existed machinery capable of created mirrors of that size and precision. That infrastructure and manufacturing process had already been created a decade earlier for Keyhole. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  30 years later with Hubble still in service, I think I definitely would have taken the 3m mirror(which is >50% bigger than a 2.4m mirror). Couple that with the fact that despite all the cost savings, Hubble's mirror was famously flawed for the first 3 years of its life and required special missions and attachments to fix the problem.
  - khuey 6y ago
    That's easy to say in hindsight. It could just as easily have gotten Hubble cancelled.
  - echelon 6y ago
    > I think I definitely would have taken the 3m mirror(which is >50% bigger than a 2.4m mirror) Opportunity cost. That budget might have been passed over, and we might not have gotten Hubble at all. We're lucky we got the discount. Thinking ahead, it's not a bad idea to mix in many smaller budgeted projects, such as the Discovery and New Frontiers programs seek to accomplish.
gumby 6y ago
> which NASA now hopes can be outfitted to look up instead of down Ah! Long ago I had a (then) gf who was a Gamma ray astronomer. For part of her PhD she worked at Livermore labs. I couldn't have lunch with her because the section she worked was classified. I asked her about it and she said that she did astronomy, and there were a lot of amazing gamma ray physicists there, but they were worried that anybody who could build or operate such a telescope could probably turn it to point down, which they very much did not want. I still wonder if she was pulling my leg.
- epiphanitus 6y ago
  What could anyone hope to see pointing a gamma ray telescope at earth? I thought gamma rays were filtered out though the atmosphere.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Detecting nuclear detonations? Or perhaps even tracking nuclear material? AFAIR, it was thanks to such gamma ray detectors pointed down that we've accidentally discovered gamma ray bursts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_(satellite)#Role_of_Vela_in_discovering_gamma-ray_bursts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_(satellite)#Role_of_Vela_...
  - gumby 6y ago
    Nuclear weapons testing I have always assumed.
    - xxpor 6y ago
      I assume not just testing, but the existence of a stockpile of fissile material in general, right? Obviously it'd need to be more sensitive but id have to assume if you observe a moving gamma ray source on earth that's really valuable information
- jacobush 6y ago
  Detect where nuclear subs and hidden installations are? Making a first strike more possible, hence M.A.D. less reliable, hence a minute further on the doomsday clock?
Quai 6y ago
What does current generation spysats collect? I mean, it looks like the optical and near optical was the focus for spysats from the early days an up to the 80's. What are the frequency domain for the current sats? Can they listen to cellphone traffic, wifi-routers and bluetooth devices? The capacity to target cellphones seems like a given. Being able to collect location and unique ids from wifi and bluetooth devices seems like a useful tool. Maybe even collect network traffic from and to specific networks and devices.
- rocqua 6y ago
  My first instinct was that atmospheric attenuation would be the biggest issue here. But some preliminary searches suggest that is not really the case. Figure 4 from here https://globaljournals.org/GJRE_Volume13/4-Propagation-Power-Loss-Analysis.pdf https://globaljournals.org/GJRE_Volume13/4-Propagation-Power... gives an attenuation of at most 0.2db for 3Ghz atmospheric attenuation (0.2db at an angle of 10 deg, 0.02db when a satellite is directly overhead. This means that essentially, power loss from distance is the only real issue power-wise. Which could be compensated for with large enough directional antennas. Next thing I'd be worried about is angular resolution. As I recall, lower wavelengths have more of an issue with diffraction. So it might be hard to design an antenna that is able to listen to a small enough area that you can distinguish individual devices. Cause if you are getting a 100m resolution, that means receiving all BT transmissions in a 100m diameter circle. Doing that in a city would probably give to many overlapping signals to do anything with. It might be nice for tracking people in the wilderness though. I have no idea how optimistic or pessimistic the 100m number is. I get the feeling that with phased array antenna's you could probably get higher resolutions that you'd think. I would guess it might be worth it if you want to trace signals out in the open (say, in middle-eastern deserts)
  - rocqua 6y ago
    So, taking the standard diffraction limit calculation, I get a resolution of 15km using an orbital height of 250km and an aperture of 2.4m (as the KH-11 uses). That resolution is inversely proportional to the aperture. So you could get it down by taking larger apertures. The best way to do that would be a phased antenna array, but that is computationally very expensive. It would be very cool though.
runeb 6y ago
Could you turn the spy sats around and use them for astronomy? Or is the hardware specifically for looking at the earths surface?

164 points by flyinglizard 6y ago

You can tell from my username that I have some opinions in this area. My questions are these: NASA can barely keep JWST on a delayed schedule without massive cost overruns. What is another telescope good for? How many astronomers and support staff do we need in this industry? How do we measure and know that it's enough? What's the breakthrough that another telescope at the cost of $Bs would achieve? (and please be specific if anyone is going to reply, not just the old "because it's worth doing" argument -- that could justify any amount of spending) These are the things you think about after you leave a field and are not beholden to it any more.

zrail 6y ago
A new space telescope will not be subject to Starlink interference. SpaceX will be happy to launch it for you at very competitive prices.
- dylan604 6y ago
  So that's the real purpose of Starlink, eh?
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    The real purpose is to offer planetary-wide 1 Gbit/s Internet access. Assuming SpaceX can keep up with the demand, this is definitely going to kill Iridium and probably all ISPs in rural areas where people these days are happy to have ISDN service (and I wish I were joking here). Also, given that a SpaceX sat dish is supposed to be the size of a pizza box which means incredibly hard to spot, it will open truly free (it will still be under the control/influence of the US government, though) Internet access worldwide... this is going to have a massive impact on China, North Korea and other countries where Internet freedom is severely restricted.
SiempreViernes 6y ago
Some of us wants to see further than the local neighbourhood man, why you gotta be so salty? In any case it's not like NASA funds ground based telescopes, so I'm not sure what you would want to happen instead, just more rockets in space with blinkenlights to mess up the Rubin frames?
justaguy88 6y ago
If starship becomes a real-go-to-orbit rocket, the cost to put this telescopes up there will go down, and they can likely use larger heavier materials to make the telescopes themselves, also reducing the cost a lot
- valuearb 6y ago
  Not sure why you are getting downvoted. The JWST is blowing through every possible budgetary limit because of the crazy lengths they have to go through to fold and unfold the sunscreen to fit a 4.5 meter fairing. Starship has a 10 meter fairing, so far less folding. It also can lift 5 times the mass of the Ariane 5, which would allow including heavier and tougher materials for the sunscreen (which has already torn once in testing), far more fuel for station keeping to extend its ten year life span by decades. Even better, Starships 10 meter fairing would allow launch an actual 6.5 meter mirror instead of one built out of 18 smaller segments. The reduction in complexity is immense. Lastly, Starship makes a JWST style observatory serviceable, even a million miles out at Earths L2 Lagrange point. That in itself makes for a longer life span, and regular upgrades, simplifying design decisions even more.
flyinglizard 6y ago
1. Broader observation spectrum (IIRC JWST is visible red to infra red) 2. Machine time for researchers (I don't know how congested Hubble is but humanity could use more than a single telescope) 3. Redundancy in case JWST goes up in flames and we're left without a space telescope
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  WFIRST is infrared and optical too, maybe there are a few nm and micrometers more or less in one or the other, but both are essentially covering the same wave lengths.
dsl 6y ago
> What's the breakthrough that another telescope at the cost of $Bs would achieve Neither will go to space. They are late-70s early-80s spy sats. This was a technology transfer so NASA could learn how NRO solved specific challenges they faced. There was talk at the time about one of them being sent up in 2024, but that hasn't even been discussed seriously in the last 8 years.
- ngoldbaum 6y ago
  That’s not true, the bus and mirror will be used by WFIRST: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Field_Infrared_Survey_Telescope https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Field_Infrared_Survey_T...
  - dsl 6y ago
    WFIRST-AFTA keeps getting budget, and that budget keeps getting diverted to the James Webb Space Telescope. Two years ago they issued the first production contracts, targeting a delivery date of 2025. Now we are looking at putting 50 year old parts in to space, at best.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Rebelgecko 6y ago
> What is another telescope good for? My understanding is that WFIRST is more of a replacement for Hubble as it slowly dies (or suddenly dies at the end of a fiscal year due to $$$). However compared to both JWST and Hubble, it has a much higher field of view (the example that NASA gave at one point is that took the Hubble several years to survey the Andromeda Galaxy in IR. WFIRST could do that same job in a few hours). This has a lot of benefits if you want to do things like look for exoplanets. WFIRST will of course be very expensive, but for a number of reasons it is unlikely that it will be even close to the cost of JWST (like JWST it will be going to the L2 Lagrange point, but it won't have to make as many design compromises as JWST to get there) The last decadal survey of astronomers[1] determined that WFIRST was a #1 priority because: "...WFIRST will settle fundamental questions about the nature of dark energy, the discovery of which was one of the greatest achievements of U.S. telescopes in recent years. It will employ three distinct techniques—measurements of weak gravitational lensing, supernova distances, and baryon acoustic oscillations— to determine the effect of dark energy on the evolution of the universe. An equally important outcome will be to open up a new frontier of exoplanet studies by monitoring a large sample of stars in the central bulge of the Milky Way for changes in brightness due to microlensing by intervening solar systems. This census, combined with that made by the Kepler mission, will determine how common Earth-like planets are over a wide range of orbital parameters. It will also, in guest investigator mode, survey our galaxy and other nearby galaxies to answer key questions about their formation and structure, and the data it obtains will provide fundamental constraints on how galaxies grow. The telescope exploits the important work done by the joint DOE/NASA design team... and expands its scientific reach. WFIRST is based on mature technologies with technical risk that is medium low and has medium cost and schedule risk... WFIRST will complement the targeted infrared observations of the James Webb Space Telescope. The small field of view of JWST would render it incapable of carrying out the prime WFIRST program of dark energy and exoplanet studies, even if it were used exclusively for this task. The recommended schedule has a launch data of 2020 with a 5-year baseline mission. An extended 10-year mission could improve the statistical results and further broaden the science program. The European Space Agency (ESA) is considering an M-class proposal, called Euclid, with related goals. Collaboration on a combined mission with the United States playing a leading role should be considered so long as the committee’s recommended science program is preserved and overall cost savings result." >How many astronomers and support staff do we need in this industry? I'm going to be honest, this comes across as a bit of a loaded question. Obviously we don't "need" any astronomers at all (or most scientists for that matter). But more theoretical research can still have tremendous payoffs. I'm a big fan a letter[2] that a paperclip'd director at NASA Marshall wrote to a nun in Zambia who asked why the US spends billions going to the moon while children on Earth starve to death. >How do we measure and know that it's enough? I don't think humanity will reach a point in any scientific endeavor where we decide that it's enough and we don't need to understand any more. I suppose it would be when we have a complete understanding of the entire universe. [1]: https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/special-events/astro2010-astronomy-and-astrophysics-decadal-survey/ https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/special-events/astro20... [2]: https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/ https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/
cryptonector 6y ago
Well, this donation == lots of saved money. That's probably why NASA comes across as a bit less than grateful.
mturmon 6y ago
The WFIRST web page gives a good description: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/wide-field-infrared-survey-telescope-wfirst/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/wide-field-infrared-survey... There are 2 instruments. The coronagraph instrument (“WFIRST-CGI”) is a high contrast imaging test bed. If we want to have a technology path to image exoplanets, we need to test and improve the tech we have for masking the starlight of a target star, while allowing us to see the reflected light from a nearby exoplanet. For earth like exoplanets, this is a 10^10 brightness difference. WFIRST will hopefully get us to 10^8. To get there, you need deformable mirrors, wavefront sensing, and active control. We will also be able to get coarsely binned spectra from WFIRST. Spectra (in general — I’m not sure if WFIRST will get there) would allow us to detect presence of water absorption features in the reflected light. Eventually, we might be able to sense the oxygen A and B bands, which would indicate non-equilibrium chemistry.
magicalhippo 6y ago
> What's the breakthrough that another telescope at the cost of $Bs would achieve? Multi-messenger astronomy[1] seems to be the next big thing. Will we lose out if we don't have a good optical telescope "up there"? Or is the current crop of gamma/x-ray and IR satellite telescopes coupled with ground-based optical telescopes good enough? I understand adaptive optics and such has drastically improved the capabilities of ground-based telescopes, but for MMA (to hijack the acronym) are there any advantages of a space-based optical telescope? [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05833 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05833
xxpor 6y ago
I'll argue the other side of the "because its worth doing" argument: 10 billion dollars just isn't that much money. It's very roughly one Amazon Seattle campus or half of the cost of the 2nd Ave subway in Manhattan. People are lending us money for basically free, might as well spend it on fun stuff rather than blowing people up.
- valuearb 6y ago
  $10B is enough to send over 100 astronauts to Mars for multi year stays. I’m guessing the science they produce will be much more actionable in the short run, and the reusable, orbital refuelable space ship used to transport them to Mars will also cut the cost of launching space telescopes by ten times.

dsl 6y ago

These were late-70s era KENNAN satellites. I wouldn't say they were "revealed" as much as they were declassified and donated. There have been 4 new generations of imagery platforms since, up to the current MISTY system that started launching in 1990.

SiempreViernes 6y ago
Are you saying there are big innovations in the optics for the newer ones? I mean, we saw what the current capability was last year, and it that didn't seem like it's hugely better than the picture they put in the article.
- dsl 6y ago
  Spy satellites aren't like camera phones. The killer feature isn't always higher resolution or being able to zoom in on a licence plate. Imagine having a big enough sensor and lens array to be able to see every individual boat in the Strait of Hormuz and track them all in real time. Or being able to pinpoint a spot on the planet and over the course of multiple passes by different birds, be able to construct a photo realistic 3D model of an oil refinery for a SEAL team to walk through in VR.
  - ThisIsTheWay 6y ago
    +1. The GEOINT and IMINT communities are investing heavily in multi-source collocation and automated analysis. In the past the focus was to improve resolution, now the goal is to improve the analysis of the images with additional data. Short wave infrared, synthetic aperture radar, creation and maintenance of digital elevation models, and frequent revisit rates to aide in computer/AI monitored change detection are all high priority. Great reading here: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/31/20746926/sentient-national-reconnaissance-office-spy-satellites-artificial-intelligence-ai https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/31/20746926/sentient-nationa...
  - RyJones 6y ago
    I attended Hack The Machine[0] in Seattle a few years ago. The amount of data the had for people to work on was amazing - the Navy provided a set of AIS data with some number of collisions in it; the challenge was to use your technique to find more collisions in the broader dataset. The guy said something like the Navy had 100% of AIS data going back a decade for us to work on, because of course they do. [0]: https://www.hackthemachine.ai/ https://www.hackthemachine.ai/

chunger 6y ago

I did not realize that the Keyhole line of spy sats had a resolution of 4" from 200 miles away! That tech is at least a decade old, so imagine what exists today.

Afforess 6y ago
You don't have to imagine. Trump leaked a satellite photo from a spy satellite last year. Wired has a great piece on it: https://www.wired.com/story/trump-tweeted-a-sensitive-photo-internet-sleuths-decoded-it/ https://www.wired.com/story/trump-tweeted-a-sensitive-photo-...
- casefields 6y ago
  The president doesn't leak per se. He's the ultimate authority on classification, therefore by releasing top secret material he has declassified it.
  - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    Trump disclosed something that he should not have done and wouldn't have done if he had a brain in his head. Not technically leaking is separate from something that did not help the country. It was a stupid action - of course not your point.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - flyinglizard 6y ago
      First, the picture was not released in full resolution. It was a photo of a print of a photo. Second, there is also value to letting your adversaries know what you are capable of. Just think of the hassle of hiding activities from a satellite like that - surely it takes a huge operational toll. No matter what, it sounds to me like releasing the picture is within the presidential oversight. He was not naming spies or anything.
    - 6y ago

xphosadria 6y ago

Look at those code names corona!!! This is clearly the source of the virus

NotSammyHagar 6y ago

I'd like to read more about the failure of Boeing to make the next gen after the Lockheed KH-11. Giant too big to fail Boeing is struggling with parts of the SLS and their version of a new human rated capsule for the space station. Being has many successes but also failures - yet I've never heard of this KH-11 successor failure?

rbanffy 6y ago
I don't think we would. Disclosure of non-readiness is a big no-no.
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  this was many years ago, so like the kh-11 details its not so sensitive. this is probably a management failure, perhaps on top of technical failures. So no details?

billyhoffman 6y ago

My favorite KH-11/Hubble story is that during the design of the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA originally wanted a 3 meter mirror. However when they began to design and budget the satellite they were quietly told they should reconsider and use a 2.4 meter mirror, as this would be significantly cheaper since they would be able to leverage existed machinery capable of created mirrors of that size and precision. That infrastructure and manufacturing process had already been created a decade earlier for Keyhole. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen

oh_sigh 6y ago
30 years later with Hubble still in service, I think I definitely would have taken the 3m mirror(which is >50% bigger than a 2.4m mirror). Couple that with the fact that despite all the cost savings, Hubble's mirror was famously flawed for the first 3 years of its life and required special missions and attachments to fix the problem.
- khuey 6y ago
  That's easy to say in hindsight. It could just as easily have gotten Hubble cancelled.
- echelon 6y ago
  > I think I definitely would have taken the 3m mirror(which is >50% bigger than a 2.4m mirror) Opportunity cost. That budget might have been passed over, and we might not have gotten Hubble at all. We're lucky we got the discount. Thinking ahead, it's not a bad idea to mix in many smaller budgeted projects, such as the Discovery and New Frontiers programs seek to accomplish.

gumby 6y ago

> which NASA now hopes can be outfitted to look up instead of down Ah! Long ago I had a (then) gf who was a Gamma ray astronomer. For part of her PhD she worked at Livermore labs. I couldn't have lunch with her because the section she worked was classified. I asked her about it and she said that she did astronomy, and there were a lot of amazing gamma ray physicists there, but they were worried that anybody who could build or operate such a telescope could probably turn it to point down, which they very much did not want. I still wonder if she was pulling my leg.

epiphanitus 6y ago
What could anyone hope to see pointing a gamma ray telescope at earth? I thought gamma rays were filtered out though the atmosphere.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Detecting nuclear detonations? Or perhaps even tracking nuclear material? AFAIR, it was thanks to such gamma ray detectors pointed down that we've accidentally discovered gamma ray bursts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_(satellite)#Role_of_Vela_in_discovering_gamma-ray_bursts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_(satellite)#Role_of_Vela_...
- gumby 6y ago
  Nuclear weapons testing I have always assumed.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    I assume not just testing, but the existence of a stockpile of fissile material in general, right? Obviously it'd need to be more sensitive but id have to assume if you observe a moving gamma ray source on earth that's really valuable information
jacobush 6y ago
Detect where nuclear subs and hidden installations are? Making a first strike more possible, hence M.A.D. less reliable, hence a minute further on the doomsday clock?

Quai 6y ago

What does current generation spysats collect? I mean, it looks like the optical and near optical was the focus for spysats from the early days an up to the 80's. What are the frequency domain for the current sats? Can they listen to cellphone traffic, wifi-routers and bluetooth devices? The capacity to target cellphones seems like a given. Being able to collect location and unique ids from wifi and bluetooth devices seems like a useful tool. Maybe even collect network traffic from and to specific networks and devices.

rocqua 6y ago
My first instinct was that atmospheric attenuation would be the biggest issue here. But some preliminary searches suggest that is not really the case. Figure 4 from here https://globaljournals.org/GJRE_Volume13/4-Propagation-Power-Loss-Analysis.pdf https://globaljournals.org/GJRE_Volume13/4-Propagation-Power... gives an attenuation of at most 0.2db for 3Ghz atmospheric attenuation (0.2db at an angle of 10 deg, 0.02db when a satellite is directly overhead. This means that essentially, power loss from distance is the only real issue power-wise. Which could be compensated for with large enough directional antennas. Next thing I'd be worried about is angular resolution. As I recall, lower wavelengths have more of an issue with diffraction. So it might be hard to design an antenna that is able to listen to a small enough area that you can distinguish individual devices. Cause if you are getting a 100m resolution, that means receiving all BT transmissions in a 100m diameter circle. Doing that in a city would probably give to many overlapping signals to do anything with. It might be nice for tracking people in the wilderness though. I have no idea how optimistic or pessimistic the 100m number is. I get the feeling that with phased array antenna's you could probably get higher resolutions that you'd think. I would guess it might be worth it if you want to trace signals out in the open (say, in middle-eastern deserts)
- rocqua 6y ago
  So, taking the standard diffraction limit calculation, I get a resolution of 15km using an orbital height of 250km and an aperture of 2.4m (as the KH-11 uses). That resolution is inversely proportional to the aperture. So you could get it down by taking larger apertures. The best way to do that would be a phased antenna array, but that is computationally very expensive. It would be very cool though.

runeb 6y ago

Could you turn the spy sats around and use them for astronomy? Or is the hardware specifically for looking at the earths surface?