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NASA PHOTO: New Mexico Wildfire Over Gila National Forest Spotted By Satellite

The space agency's original prototype orbiter, Enterprise is scheduled to arrive at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum on the west side of Manhattan on Tuesday.

By Robert Z. Pearlman,SPACE.com / June 4, 2012

NASA's space shuttle Enterprise launched on a voyage Sunday (June 3), going where no space shuttle has gone before: New Jersey.

The space agency's original prototype orbiter, Enterprise is scheduled to arrive at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum on the west side of Manhattan on Tuesday (June 5). Leaving Sunday from New York's John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport where it was delivered atop a jumbo jet in late April, theshuttle was barged to Bayonne, N.J., as a layover on its way up the Hudson River.

Enterprise, having firstarrived in the Big Apple by airand setting sail Sunday by sea, is only missing the experience of traveling through space to complete the Intrepid's three modal themes. The first of NASA's space shuttles, Enterprise did not fly in orbit but instead was used for a series of approach and landing tests in the late 1970s. [Gallery: Enterprise Sails to New Jersey]

Enterprise embarks

On Saturday, a large crane was used to load the 57,000 pound (26,000 kilogram) prototype shuttle onto the open air flat bed barge, which, towed by tugboat, made the trip to the Garden State the next day. Spectators in Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn, including at Coney Island, lined the shores to watch as Enterprise floated by.

Along the way, thespace shuttle Enterprisepassed under several crossings, its vertical stabilizer, or tail, clearing the Verrazano Bridge, for example, by a good margin. At others, including the Gil Hodges Memorial, the bridges needed to be raised to allow the shuttle to pass.

The shuttle will stay in Bayonne through Tuesday. On Monday, it'll be hoisted off its barge onto one equipped with a crane.

Enterprise arrives

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NASA space shuttle embarks on voyage to New Jersey

NASA has received a gift from an unexpected source: the U.S. satellite spy agency.

The space agency confirmed Monday that it has received a pair of giant identical telescopes from the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an agency within the Department of Defense that oversees the U.S.'s constellation of spy satellites.

The telescopes have mirrors similar in size to the famed Hubble Space Telescope, and the Washington Post reported that they also have a moveable secondary mirror for more focused images.

NASA says the intelligence agency built them and then decided it no longer needed them, a stark contrast to NASA, which is still struggling to build and finance its own next-generation telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope.

The transfer of the instruments from the NRO to NASA occurred last summer but was only recently declassified.

Even with this windfall, the cash-strapped space agency, which was forced to end its 30-year-shuttle program last year and has run over budget on the Webb telescope, has no money to launch the telescopes anytime soon.

NASA officials said on Monday they likely won't be in use until 2020 at the earliest, two years after the Webb telescope is scheduled to be launched.

For now, the gifted telescopes are of no use to NASA as they lack the cameras and instruments necessary for astronomy research.

The telescopes are currently in upstate New York.

Scientists hope NASA will repurpose one of the telescopes to study mysterious dark energy.

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NASA gets 2 Hubble-size telescopes from spy agency

Its been a rough year for NASAs science program, with a major pullback in its Mars exploration program and continuing threats to cancel the James Webb Space Telescope.

Now comes news today that NASA has acquired two Hubble-like telescopes from the National Reconnaissance Office, the U.S. Government agency in charge of designing, building, launching, and maintaining Americas intelligence satellites.

These telescopes, which are identical, were built eight years after Hubble so they have greater capabilities, such as being able to image a field of view 100 times larger than Hubble. They are space-ready but were never used.

The newly acquired telescopes are a shorter, stubbier version of the Hubble shown above. (NASA)

This is a great opportunity for NASA, and Ill get to that in a moment, but stop and think about this for a moment. The Department of Defense has the kind of funding needed hundred of millions to billions of dollars, presumably to build not one, but two, Hubble-like optical telescopes and then never use them.

Also unanswered is what the telescopes might have been used for by the NRO, but one guesses it wasnt for probing the complexities of dark energy.

But thats what NASA wants them for. The telescopes fit the nature of the kind of instrument NASA needs to conduct its Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope mission, ranked as the top priority among large science mission in the countrys most recent survey of astronomy and astrophysics projects.

The telescopes are space-ready, but far from being a ready to launch project. They still need a spacecraft that includes power, communications, control and thermal protection systems, in addition to a launch vehicle and a means to control them from the ground.

Nevertheless the telescopes could provide a critical impetus to getting the WFIRST project moving forward.

It could be a real game changer for a project that was having trouble getting a lot of traction, said Alan Dressler, a Carnegie Institute astronomer who has studied the telescopes for astronomical use.

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NASA gets 2 Hubble-like telescopes

An image of the proposed WFIRST design, which may be changed radically thanks to a gift from a spy agency.

Today, news broke that the National Reconnaissance Office, which handles satellite-based surveillance, had agreed to transfer two space-capable telescope lens systems to NASA. At a press call held today, NASA administrators said that while most of the remaining structure for a space-based telescope would still have to be built, the gift could jump-start a planned infrared survey telescope called WFIRST. That is, if Congress allocates money to take advantage of the gift. But at best, the hardware won't be in orbit until the start of the next decade.

The NRO apparently decided that some of the hardware it designed and built for use in spy satellites (but did not place in orbit) would be superfluous for its current needs. Back in January of 2011, the agency got in touch with NASA and offered to transfer the hardware (along with the design and test data from its construction). Since then, NASA has been paying about $100,000 a year to store the two telescopes in Rochester, New York while it decides if and how it can use them.

The primary lenses of the system are 2.4 meters, the same size as the lens in Hubble. Paul Hertz, the director of NASA's Astrophysics Division, described the lenses as being a different shape, "more like a bowl than a shallow disk." They're also much lighter, having benefitted from decades of technology advances. The difference in shape makes these suitable for survey missions, as opposed to high-resolution images. Compared to the Hubble, they would give you "about [a] 100 times bigger area that you can image well."

After NASA's internal analysis, a good match was found between these capabilities and an existing project, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST. WFIRST is planned to achieve three different goals. Its general survey of the infrared sky should identify objects of interest that could then be examined by the James Webb Space Telescope, which would have a much higher resolving power. The second goal would be to track the distribution of early galaxies and supernovae, which would let us get a better grip on the properties of dark energy accelerating the expansion of the Universe.

The final focus of WFIRST is to provide an independent measure of the frequency and properties of exoplanets. As exoplanets travel between the Earth and distant galaxies, they can act as small gravitational lenses, distorting space in a way that causes a temporary brightening of the background galaxy. Since the degree of change in the incoming light depends on gravitational effects, it provides some information about the mass of the planet doing the lensing.

WFIRST is already in the planning stages, but documents from last year's interim report indicate that the team behind it was considering a 1.3m primary mirror. This means the NRO hardware would provide a significant boost. According to the people on the press call, designing the optical system for a space-based telescope is also the most complex and expensive portion of the development process, and the NRO hardware could save hundreds of millions of dollars.

That said, NASA would still have its work cut out for it. The optical system would need power, communications hardware, pointing systems, insulation, a camera, and many other pieces before it could provide usable data. Then it would need a launch vehicle, which, based on the size of the optical system, would need to be at least an Atlas-class launcher. Of course, the space launch market is changing rapidlya future version of SpaceX's Falcon was raised as a possible optionso this seems to be the least of NASA's worries. As someone on the call put it, there's an office that will take the specifications and "find us an appropriate ride."

Developing all the additional hardware, however, won't come cheap, and even if money were to become plentiful, NASA doesn't think WFIRST could be put in space before 2020. Under "plausible" budgets, 2024 is more likely. But NASA administrators would have to specifically ask for it, and Congress would have to allocate the money. All that NASA will say for now is that the appropriate committee staff members have been briefed.

In the meantime, the agency has to work within some limits imposed by the telescopes' history. It won't be able, for example, to release any pictures until after the lenses are covered by all that additional hardware. USA Today'sDan Vergano was given an image of the telescope that was used at a recent meeting of the National Research Council. The level of redaction indicates that there will be some significant limits on any NASA design teams.

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NASA gets two unneeded Hubble-sized spy telescopes

A NASA Earth-observing satellite has snapped a photo of the huge wildfire chewing up vast swathes of southwestern New Mexico.

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Huge New Mexico Wildfire Spotted by NASA Satellite

The National Reconnaissance Office is giving NASA two spare space telescopes free of charge, each potentially more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope.

The United States' spy satellite agency is giving NASA two spare space telescopes free of charge, each potentially more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA officials announced today (June 4).

The twospy satellite telescopeswere originally built to fly space-based surveillance missions for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), but will be repurposed by NASA for astronomical research instead. Their donation to NASA was revealed in a surprise announcement.

Both NRO space telescopes have a main mirror nearly 8 feet wide (2.4 meters), rivaling theHubble Space Telescope, and also carry a secondary mirror to enhance image sharpness, according to press reports. NASA's Hubble telescope is a space icon that has been beaming stunning photos to Earth for 22 years.

NASA and NRO officials did not elaborate on the original design or mission for the reconnaissance telescopes, though officialstold the Washington Postthat the earliest either of the instruments could be recycled into a new space telescope and launched into orbit would be 2020. Finding the funding necessary to refit and launch the telescopes is a major hurdle, officials said.

NASA hopes to use one of the new space telescopes to hunt for mysterious dark energy, an invisible force that scientists think is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe.

During a media teleconference today, NASA officials said the two telescopes have an appearance similar to the Hubble telescope: They are cylindrical in shape and covered in shiny reflective insulation. The two telescopes do not currently have names, they added.

The Hubble space telescope, which launched in 1990, is the size of a school bus and has become an astronomical icon. But Hubble is also aging. Since its launch, Hubble has been repaired or upgraded five separate times, most recently in 2009 when NASA astronauts paid the last-ever service call on the venerable instrument.

Eventually, Hubble will be decommissioned and then intentionally destroyed by plunging into Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.

Currently, NASA has no plans to replace Hubble, which is primarily an optical observatory, with a similar instrument. The space agency's next big orbital observatory is the James Webb Space Telescope, an infrared-only telescope designed to peer deep into the universe's 13.7 billion-year history.

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Spy agency bequeaths two satellites to NASA, free of charge

NASA has received a gift from an unexpected source — the nation's satellite spy agency.

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US satellite spy agency donates telescopes to NASA

The United States' spy satellite agency is giving NASA two spare space telescopes free of charge, each potentially more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA officials announced today (June 4).

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U.S. Spy Satellite Agency Gives NASA 2 Space Telescopes