as obsolete cast-offs from the National Reconnaissance Office. One wonders about the capabilities of the telescopes the NRO is keeping. Apparently these old ones can resolve down to about a foot when pointed at earth from orbit.

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Ex-Spy Telescope May Get New Identity as a Space Investigator
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: June 4, 2012

The phone call came like a bolt out of the blue, so to speak, in January 2011. On the other end of the line was someone from the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates the nation’s fleet of spy satellites. They had some spare, unused “hardware” to get rid of. Was NASA interested?

So when John Grunsfeld, the physicist and former astronaut, walked into his office a year later to start his new job as NASA’s associate administrator for space science, he discovered that his potential armada was a bit bigger than he knew.

Sitting in a room in upstate New York were two telescopes the same size as the famed Hubble Space Telescope, but built to point down at the Earth, instead of up at the heavens.

• Full article at NY Times

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justitia omnibus
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"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

---Mark Twain