NASA May Launch Donated Spy Satellite Telescope to Mars

[bananas]

Source: Space.com

One of the two spy satellite telescopes that recently fell into NASA's lap may eventually make its way to the Red Planet.

The space agency is currently mulling potential uses for the two space telescopes, which were donated by the National Reconnaissance Office and are comparable in size and appearance to NASA's venerable Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

Some scientists have proposed sending one of the powerful telescopes to Mars orbit, where it could look both up and down, giving researchers great views of the Red Planet's surface as well as targets in the outer solar system and beyond.

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But MOST likely wouldn't be able to study extremely distant objects as well as the famous HST, because installing a Hubble-like guidance and navigation system that allows a prolonged lock on such faint targets would raise the price tag significantly, McEwen said.

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Read more: http://www.space.com/21064-nasa-donated-spy-telescope-mars.html

[longship]

1. Ermagerd! Drones on Mars!!!!

... Wait a minute. There's been drones on Mars for over a generation. About time they had spy satellites, too. But wait... Don't they already have those, too?

Bad NASA!

[Posteritatis]

2. This made my day a little better after the Kepler news. (nt)

[bananas]

3. That's why I posted it.

"Keep looking up!" - Jack Horkheimer

[Victor_c3]

4. They can throw billions away on stuff that neither makes me proud or safe with the DOD

why not throw the money to something like this project? I say "pimp out" the telescope and send it to mars. Maybe send the other one to Saturn like the Cassini probe that is currently there and get a much more detailed image of the stuff in that system.

[paleotn]

5. Seriously....

....just shave off a few 10's of millions from DoD and let NASA actually do something constructive with it. DoD wouldn't even feel that kind of a cut. Regardless, those are some pretty cool hand-me-downs.

[sofa king]

7. Once percent of DOD's budget...

... just so happens to be in the same order of magnitude as the amount that NASA spends on defense-related activities.

Pulling FY 2010 numbers from Wikipedia shows a DOD budget of $689 billion and a NASA budget of $17.8 billion (already down to 16B this year), but the DOD figure may also include NASA's defense-related activities, which are 20-50% of NASA's budget, from $3.8B to $8.7B.

I'm not a budget guy anymore, but I think that may mean that NASA is actually footing one percent of DOD's bill, rather than the other way around. Better not take my word for that, though. That's a Wikipedia-based guess, and you know how those go.

[Thor_MN]

6. Imagine parking these at LaGrange points and being able to use them as an interferometer.

[Cobalt-60]

8. One for Mars, the other for the Moon

I can think of a thousand used for these excellent scopes.
I particularly like the LaGrange Point Inferometer proposal.
I like the Most concept.
I'd make two, one for the Moon and one for Mars.
The moon would be a good test mission, and a mission might be planned to recover the device.