- Joined
- Jan 9, 2020
I have been near the James Webb Space Telescope - within kicking distance. I won't say where or when. When I asked the Director of the program how sensitive the IR detection capabilities were I was told "If there was a bee on the surface of the moon, we can detect it". verbatim.
While I was in attendance one section of the Telescope was hidden from view and we were told it was proprietary. However, not everyone thinks so, and in fact, some think it is something else. The story isn't adding up at all. Bear with me...
I have the privilege of knowing a person who directly worked on the Hubble Telescope (in no small role I might add) and when I told them they are telling people that what is being hidden is the actuators, mounts or Adaptive optics they doubted this very much. When I showed the person the section that was being withheld they said it made no sense why that area would be considered confidential at all and disagreed entirely with the premise. And they would know. They completely dismissed the reason given and labelled it "false".
Let me go over a few of the key details on why it is pretty clear we aren't being told exactly what is going on with this Telescope:
1. We are told that this particular section is proprietary - but almost every part of the telescope is from the mirrors, how they form and move...everything is state of the art and proprietary. We are being told a relatively reported "insignificant" piece of actuator or mount is somehow more secret than the rest of this 10 billion dollar beast. The mirrors? Their actuators? The shield? The Cryogenic unit? The IR devices? All unique, proprietary - but no one is blurring them out are they?
2. In 2014 NASA required the person overseeing the program to have the highest security clearance available in the United States reserved for the highest intelligence officials. Other telescopes and even space missions have required less of staff or project leaders.
3. There is the primary mirror, which reflects light to the secondary mirror which then sends the light to the sensors. It is the equipment around the secondary mirror that is being kept a secret. Why? This section is only supposed to house mounts and actuators much like the primary mirror, so why is it confidential? What is the big deal? We see the mounts and actuators for the primary mirror which are more precise, so why the big deal on the secondary mirror? There isn't one.
4. It has been stated that the mounts and/or the actuators of the secondary mirror are secret. Conflicting statements have been issued. They are not secret.
5. The Actuators on the JWST are well known and in fact there is even a YouTube video showing a model of one based on the information publicly available - so why would an actuator for the secondary mirror be so secret? Moreover, if we dismiss the Actuator as the secret sauce the we are left with the only other piece of equipment - the mount - as being somehow top secret but no other part of the telescope is? if the answer is Adaptive Optics, that hardly qualifies as a secret given the technology is used in countless telescopes globally - but aren't used in space telescopes. So why does this one have "adaptive optics"?
Here is some documentation.
First image shows the JWST. Note the 3 boon arms extending away from the primary mirror. This is where the secondary mirror is facing towards the primary. On the other side is "the secret"
Next, here is an image of the secondary mirror, the arrow show "the secret side" which faces away from the telescope:
Now for the blurred image of the "secret"
And here we see openly displayed the actuators from the Hexapods which have apparently even more precision than the actuators used on the secondary mirror. So you see anything blurred out? No? Funny that. Go on YouTube and you can see a model of one.
Note in the statement below, the person says ""The secondary mirror relays light from the primary mirror and does optical correction."" but optical correction is something that is usually required for an Earth bound telescope. Why does a space telescope require "optical correction" at the secondary mirror when the distance travelled from the primary is less than 20 feet?
Here is the bullshit statement issued:
"This technology is proprietary. The government must respect the intellectual property of its industry partners," Chandler told Business Insider in an email.
We then asked which company made the blurred-out part, and requested more details about it and its role in JWST's mission — which, by the way, is to study objects at the edge of the universe and quite possibly the air around Earth-like exoplanets.
"That is the secondary mirror support structure with the secondary mirror on it, which includes details of mirror mounts," Chandler said. "The secondary mirror relays light from the primary mirror and does optical correction."
For reference, below is JWST's secondary mirror with its convex, gold-plated surface. It's a critical part. It takes all of the giant primary mirror's light and focuses it onto a third mirror inside the telescope's housing, which then bounces it into a suite of detectors. Presto, images of the universe.
NASA declined to tell us which company made the blurred-out part, saying that information is an International Traffic in Arms Regulations issue. (More on this jargon in a moment.)
However, we know Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor that designed the spacecraft, and Ball Aerospace built the secondary mirror.
Lon Rains, a Northrop Grumman representative, declined to comment further and asked us to direct our questions to NASA. Ball Aerospace did not immediately respond.
Why is the back of a mirror on a taxpayer-funded scientific observatory considered an "arm" that must be regulated?
Probably because of spy satellites.
After all, if your telescope can see as sharply as Hubble, yet resolve objects 10 to 100 times dimmer — as JWST should be able to do — that could be useful for peering down at human activity on Earth. And the US government wants to maintain any edge it can over the militaries of countries like China and Russia.
In fact, if you're working in the US — or for the country — on anything that could be even remotely considered a weapon, including a do-it-yourself spacesuit, you have to make sure it's not on the Department of State's ITAR munitions list. Otherwise you might have to pay up to $1,094,010 and possibly face jail time for each violation.
ITAR experts are common inside companies and agencies that work with space technologies, so one of them at NASA probably reviewed their video and said "this part has to be blurred out" to avoid a violation.
"It's basically caution about space hardware details being released by the US government," Anand Sivaramakrishnan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland (which works closely with the JWST mission), told Business Insider.
"If I had a piece of space hardware in my room, I may not be allowed to have a foreigner come into my room" per ITAR regulations, Sivaramakrishnan said. "I couldn't let him or her touch it."
NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterThough we're not in the aerospace business, we don't want to violate ITAR — and possibly pay a million dollars.
But we can describe what's back there, generally speaking. (Note: There is a moment in the NASA video that does appear to show the back of the secondary mirror.)
So what is it?
Sivaramakrishnan said it's probably the support structure for the mirror, plus a cluster of motorized actuators that can move it.
You're already familiar with mirror actuators if you've driven a modern car. They're what whir when you fiddle with a side-mirror adjustment knob. But where automobile actuators typically have only two actuators and degrees of freedom — side to side, and up and down — each of JWST's mirrors has six degrees of freedom.
Sivaramakrishnan said the cluster of six actuators is called a hexapod.
"If you take a computer keyboard and hold it in space, it needs six numbers to describe where it is in space," he said. That's up and down, forward and backward, side to side, and a rotational aspect to each one. "So if you want to put a mirror in the exact right location, you have to specify that. And that's a hexapod."
The precision you need in a space telescope in mind-bogglingly precise, though. And JWST has 19 gold-plated mirrors with a hexapod a piece.
Sivaramakrishnan said the tolerance — or error in distance — that the primary mirror of JWST can only be off by 140 nanometers, or just larger than the width of an HIV virus. Any more, and there could be huge problems with the focus and exposure.
The hardware required to do this on JWST is "fancy," he said, and "the details are under restriction."
So if you'd like to find out more, now is as good a time as any to work toward your aerospace engineering degree and get a job at NASA or one of its contractors. Good luck!
END
NASA says the requirement is standard, although the ad raised some eyebrows in the security community. “It seems quite unusual,” says former CIA analyst Allen Thomson, who speculates that the clearance might allow the JWST director to coordinate using NASA telescope technology for National Reconnaissance Office satellites. Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy noted the requirement on his Secrecy News blog. “My first reaction was surprise that this was among the key requirements for the position,” Aftergood says. “And it’s a sign of just how closely the civilian space program is intertwined with national security.”
The JWST director will be required to have access to Top Secret and Sensitive Compartmented Information—the highest level of classified information, derived from intelligence sources and methods, Aftergood says. “It potentially covers a lot of ground.” To receive such a security clearance, a person might have to undergo polygraph testing, an oral interview and a thorough background check. “It raises a concern because of the potential to exclude some highly qualified candidates. There are some distinguished scientists who may be unwilling to submit to the security clearance process and the whole apparatus that comes with it, which can include such things as prepublication review requirements, intrusive background investigations and other moderately unpleasant features.”
The Webb telescope is being planned as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and will peer at some of the farthest reaches of space and time. The $8.8-billion observatory is due to launch in 2018. Whereas the current directors of Hubble and other major space telescopes, such as NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, do not have security clearances the JWST director must because the telescope is still in the planning phase, according to NASA. “Senior NASA officials involved with the planning and development of future NASA space telescopes, such as the Science Mission Directorate associate administrator and the director of astrophysics, are expected to have security clearances for the same reasons as the JWST director,” says NASA spokesperson Felicia Chou.
Perhaps unsurprisingly with regards to such a secretive topic, NASA was mum on the details of what aspects of JWST planning require top secret clearance. “It is important to ensure that the JWST program director is exposed to and benefits from common practices, standards and manufacturing techniques that are used in both classified and unclassified programs,” Chou says. “This leads to a better understanding of the work involved and better mission outcomes.”
Aftergood speculated that the requirement likely had to do with the interface between Webb’s technology and that used in intelligence and military Earth-observing satellites. “I think it probably reflects the role of surveillance technology and the need for coordination with U.S. intelligence agencies,” he says.
Of course, fertile minds will inevitably hatch some more exciting, and implausible, possible reasons for the security requirement. For example, top secret clearance could come in handy if NASA ever encounters little green men (wink, wink).
END
Conclusion?
Something is mounted to the other side of the secondary mirror and it is no mount; nor is it an series of actuators although both will be there but there is something else.
Speculation?
If the primary mirrors can resolve with such accuracy as to collect light from a pinpoint, then a transmission from the secondary mirror aimed at the primary mirror should send a signal. The most probable type of signal? A laser or radio wave.
Other possible scenario - Speculation:
During the L2 orbit there will be a brief period where the telescope can be made to look at Earth, while the sunshield still shields the sun. At 1 million miles distance the IR heat from Earth will be insufficient to heat the telescope, but will allow the telescope to briefly look down on Earth with incredible precision to locate facilities below the surface or the ocean or land that can ironically only be detected at a great distance (i.e. you won't see the details of the plastic outlines of a car lamp close up due to glare, but far away you can resolve these differences). To do this, the secondary mirror may need Adaptive optics hardware to correct the distortion from Earths atmosphere in reverse of what telescopes on Earth have to deal with when viewing through the atmosphere.
Views welcome!
While I was in attendance one section of the Telescope was hidden from view and we were told it was proprietary. However, not everyone thinks so, and in fact, some think it is something else. The story isn't adding up at all. Bear with me...
I have the privilege of knowing a person who directly worked on the Hubble Telescope (in no small role I might add) and when I told them they are telling people that what is being hidden is the actuators, mounts or Adaptive optics they doubted this very much. When I showed the person the section that was being withheld they said it made no sense why that area would be considered confidential at all and disagreed entirely with the premise. And they would know. They completely dismissed the reason given and labelled it "false".
Let me go over a few of the key details on why it is pretty clear we aren't being told exactly what is going on with this Telescope:
1. We are told that this particular section is proprietary - but almost every part of the telescope is from the mirrors, how they form and move...everything is state of the art and proprietary. We are being told a relatively reported "insignificant" piece of actuator or mount is somehow more secret than the rest of this 10 billion dollar beast. The mirrors? Their actuators? The shield? The Cryogenic unit? The IR devices? All unique, proprietary - but no one is blurring them out are they?
2. In 2014 NASA required the person overseeing the program to have the highest security clearance available in the United States reserved for the highest intelligence officials. Other telescopes and even space missions have required less of staff or project leaders.
3. There is the primary mirror, which reflects light to the secondary mirror which then sends the light to the sensors. It is the equipment around the secondary mirror that is being kept a secret. Why? This section is only supposed to house mounts and actuators much like the primary mirror, so why is it confidential? What is the big deal? We see the mounts and actuators for the primary mirror which are more precise, so why the big deal on the secondary mirror? There isn't one.
4. It has been stated that the mounts and/or the actuators of the secondary mirror are secret. Conflicting statements have been issued. They are not secret.
5. The Actuators on the JWST are well known and in fact there is even a YouTube video showing a model of one based on the information publicly available - so why would an actuator for the secondary mirror be so secret? Moreover, if we dismiss the Actuator as the secret sauce the we are left with the only other piece of equipment - the mount - as being somehow top secret but no other part of the telescope is? if the answer is Adaptive Optics, that hardly qualifies as a secret given the technology is used in countless telescopes globally - but aren't used in space telescopes. So why does this one have "adaptive optics"?
Here is some documentation.
First image shows the JWST. Note the 3 boon arms extending away from the primary mirror. This is where the secondary mirror is facing towards the primary. On the other side is "the secret"
Next, here is an image of the secondary mirror, the arrow show "the secret side" which faces away from the telescope:
Now for the blurred image of the "secret"
And here we see openly displayed the actuators from the Hexapods which have apparently even more precision than the actuators used on the secondary mirror. So you see anything blurred out? No? Funny that. Go on YouTube and you can see a model of one.
Note in the statement below, the person says ""The secondary mirror relays light from the primary mirror and does optical correction."" but optical correction is something that is usually required for an Earth bound telescope. Why does a space telescope require "optical correction" at the secondary mirror when the distance travelled from the primary is less than 20 feet?
Here is the bullshit statement issued:
"This technology is proprietary. The government must respect the intellectual property of its industry partners," Chandler told Business Insider in an email.
We then asked which company made the blurred-out part, and requested more details about it and its role in JWST's mission — which, by the way, is to study objects at the edge of the universe and quite possibly the air around Earth-like exoplanets.
"That is the secondary mirror support structure with the secondary mirror on it, which includes details of mirror mounts," Chandler said. "The secondary mirror relays light from the primary mirror and does optical correction."
For reference, below is JWST's secondary mirror with its convex, gold-plated surface. It's a critical part. It takes all of the giant primary mirror's light and focuses it onto a third mirror inside the telescope's housing, which then bounces it into a suite of detectors. Presto, images of the universe.
NASA declined to tell us which company made the blurred-out part, saying that information is an International Traffic in Arms Regulations issue. (More on this jargon in a moment.)
However, we know Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor that designed the spacecraft, and Ball Aerospace built the secondary mirror.
Lon Rains, a Northrop Grumman representative, declined to comment further and asked us to direct our questions to NASA. Ball Aerospace did not immediately respond.
Why is the back of a mirror on a taxpayer-funded scientific observatory considered an "arm" that must be regulated?
Probably because of spy satellites.
After all, if your telescope can see as sharply as Hubble, yet resolve objects 10 to 100 times dimmer — as JWST should be able to do — that could be useful for peering down at human activity on Earth. And the US government wants to maintain any edge it can over the militaries of countries like China and Russia.
In fact, if you're working in the US — or for the country — on anything that could be even remotely considered a weapon, including a do-it-yourself spacesuit, you have to make sure it's not on the Department of State's ITAR munitions list. Otherwise you might have to pay up to $1,094,010 and possibly face jail time for each violation.
ITAR experts are common inside companies and agencies that work with space technologies, so one of them at NASA probably reviewed their video and said "this part has to be blurred out" to avoid a violation.
"It's basically caution about space hardware details being released by the US government," Anand Sivaramakrishnan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland (which works closely with the JWST mission), told Business Insider.
"If I had a piece of space hardware in my room, I may not be allowed to have a foreigner come into my room" per ITAR regulations, Sivaramakrishnan said. "I couldn't let him or her touch it."
What isn't being shown?
NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterThough we're not in the aerospace business, we don't want to violate ITAR — and possibly pay a million dollars.
But we can describe what's back there, generally speaking. (Note: There is a moment in the NASA video that does appear to show the back of the secondary mirror.)
So what is it?
Sivaramakrishnan said it's probably the support structure for the mirror, plus a cluster of motorized actuators that can move it.
You're already familiar with mirror actuators if you've driven a modern car. They're what whir when you fiddle with a side-mirror adjustment knob. But where automobile actuators typically have only two actuators and degrees of freedom — side to side, and up and down — each of JWST's mirrors has six degrees of freedom.
Sivaramakrishnan said the cluster of six actuators is called a hexapod.
"If you take a computer keyboard and hold it in space, it needs six numbers to describe where it is in space," he said. That's up and down, forward and backward, side to side, and a rotational aspect to each one. "So if you want to put a mirror in the exact right location, you have to specify that. And that's a hexapod."
The precision you need in a space telescope in mind-bogglingly precise, though. And JWST has 19 gold-plated mirrors with a hexapod a piece.
Sivaramakrishnan said the tolerance — or error in distance — that the primary mirror of JWST can only be off by 140 nanometers, or just larger than the width of an HIV virus. Any more, and there could be huge problems with the focus and exposure.
The hardware required to do this on JWST is "fancy," he said, and "the details are under restriction."
So if you'd like to find out more, now is as good a time as any to work toward your aerospace engineering degree and get a job at NASA or one of its contractors. Good luck!
END
Wanted by NASA: Space Telescope Director with Spy Credentials
The leader of the James Webb Space Telescope must have clearance that allows access to the highest level of classified information, according to a NASA want ad- By Clara Moskowitz on September 17, 2014
NASA says the requirement is standard, although the ad raised some eyebrows in the security community. “It seems quite unusual,” says former CIA analyst Allen Thomson, who speculates that the clearance might allow the JWST director to coordinate using NASA telescope technology for National Reconnaissance Office satellites. Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy noted the requirement on his Secrecy News blog. “My first reaction was surprise that this was among the key requirements for the position,” Aftergood says. “And it’s a sign of just how closely the civilian space program is intertwined with national security.”
The JWST director will be required to have access to Top Secret and Sensitive Compartmented Information—the highest level of classified information, derived from intelligence sources and methods, Aftergood says. “It potentially covers a lot of ground.” To receive such a security clearance, a person might have to undergo polygraph testing, an oral interview and a thorough background check. “It raises a concern because of the potential to exclude some highly qualified candidates. There are some distinguished scientists who may be unwilling to submit to the security clearance process and the whole apparatus that comes with it, which can include such things as prepublication review requirements, intrusive background investigations and other moderately unpleasant features.”
The Webb telescope is being planned as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and will peer at some of the farthest reaches of space and time. The $8.8-billion observatory is due to launch in 2018. Whereas the current directors of Hubble and other major space telescopes, such as NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, do not have security clearances the JWST director must because the telescope is still in the planning phase, according to NASA. “Senior NASA officials involved with the planning and development of future NASA space telescopes, such as the Science Mission Directorate associate administrator and the director of astrophysics, are expected to have security clearances for the same reasons as the JWST director,” says NASA spokesperson Felicia Chou.
Perhaps unsurprisingly with regards to such a secretive topic, NASA was mum on the details of what aspects of JWST planning require top secret clearance. “It is important to ensure that the JWST program director is exposed to and benefits from common practices, standards and manufacturing techniques that are used in both classified and unclassified programs,” Chou says. “This leads to a better understanding of the work involved and better mission outcomes.”
Aftergood speculated that the requirement likely had to do with the interface between Webb’s technology and that used in intelligence and military Earth-observing satellites. “I think it probably reflects the role of surveillance technology and the need for coordination with U.S. intelligence agencies,” he says.
Of course, fertile minds will inevitably hatch some more exciting, and implausible, possible reasons for the security requirement. For example, top secret clearance could come in handy if NASA ever encounters little green men (wink, wink).
END
Conclusion?
Something is mounted to the other side of the secondary mirror and it is no mount; nor is it an series of actuators although both will be there but there is something else.
Speculation?
If the primary mirrors can resolve with such accuracy as to collect light from a pinpoint, then a transmission from the secondary mirror aimed at the primary mirror should send a signal. The most probable type of signal? A laser or radio wave.
Other possible scenario - Speculation:
During the L2 orbit there will be a brief period where the telescope can be made to look at Earth, while the sunshield still shields the sun. At 1 million miles distance the IR heat from Earth will be insufficient to heat the telescope, but will allow the telescope to briefly look down on Earth with incredible precision to locate facilities below the surface or the ocean or land that can ironically only be detected at a great distance (i.e. you won't see the details of the plastic outlines of a car lamp close up due to glare, but far away you can resolve these differences). To do this, the secondary mirror may need Adaptive optics hardware to correct the distortion from Earths atmosphere in reverse of what telescopes on Earth have to deal with when viewing through the atmosphere.
Views welcome!