Oleg Zabluda's blog
Tuesday, June 05, 2012
 
Hubble Space Telescope (HST) funding was approved in 1978, design began aiming for the launch date of 1983.
Hubble Space Telescope (HST) funding was approved in 1978, design began aiming for the launch date of 1983. Optics (2.4m mirror) was built in 1979-1981 by Perkin-Elmer, which also built optics for KH-9 Hexagon (declassified in Sep 2011) in 1971 (0.91m mirror, 0.6m resolution). It was widely assumed at the time that NRO must have something at least as good if not better. It was later suspected to be KH-11 Kennan (1976, same 2.4m diameter mirror as HST, 0.15 cm m resolution). KH-11 was the first reconnaissance satellite equipped with CCD. Before that film had to be jettisoned.

In Jan 2011 NRO offered NASA two spare earlier block (obsolete) KH-11 satellites, with steerable secondary mirrors and shorter focal length resulting a 10x wider field of view, and told them to keep quiet about it. Later block III (Nov 1992) are rumored to have 3.15m mirror.

In Jun 2012, it all leaked out.

Paraphrasing Khrushchev, NRO is making Hubbles like sausages.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1206/04nronasa/
http://nasawatch.com/archives/2012/06/nro-gives-nasa.html#comment-547333898
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PerkinElmer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9
http://nasawatch.com/archives/2012/06/nro-gives-nasa.html#comment-547333898

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