We aren't being told the truth about the James Webb Space Telescope's abilities. - The lies are stacking up

MadStan

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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"

Screen Shot 2022-04-04 at 2.47.03 PM.png


Next, here is an image of the secondary mirror, the arrow show "the secret side" which faces away from the telescope:

Screen Shot 2022-04-04 at 2.46.20 PM.png


Now for the blurred image of the "secret"

Screen Shot 2022-04-04 at 2.46.12 PM.png


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.

Screen Shot 2022-04-04 at 2.46.41 PM.png


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?​



james webb space telescope golden mirror complete nasa gsfc

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
Conspiracy theorists may wonder, why does NASA’s next major telescope director need top secret clearance? The space agency recently posted a want ad for a person to lead its James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) program, and in addition to aerospace engineering credentials and management experience, the candidate must have the highest possible level of security credentials.

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!
 
Couldn't the part just be blurred out because there's some equivalent structure on newer NRO satellites, not because the JWST has a dual purpose specifically?
Hubble used a *lot* of the same tech and components as spy satellites of the same era. Makes sense for the JWST to have commonality as well.
 
One thing to remember is that the government (and related agencies) classifies all kinds of shit that it doesn't need to (and often legally should not) and they become absurdly anal about these things no matter how many times they're told there's no reason for them to be secret, that they aren't secret anyway as everybody knows about them and that they can't stop protecting these non-secrets. There was some flight test disaster they covered up for decades on the basis that it was protecting national security secrets. Not a single one was involved, nothing about the plane was not already in commercial aircraft and they weren't even fighting disclosure to try and be immune from lawsuits.

It's therefore entirely possible that these "proprietary secrets" are stuff you can buy at Home Depot.
 
Couldn't the part just be blurred out because there's some equivalent structure on newer NRO satellites, not because the JWST has a dual purpose specifically?
I could see this if in fact the visible hardware made a difference. I mean, if I look at a mount or an actuator, it doesn't reveal anything about what is actually within it, so I don't get the secrecy. So let us say this identical piece of hardware is present in a spy telescope, what would that impart to the viewer? I feel NASA is saying (if your premise is correct and it maybe) that looking at an Apple Computer tells you how it works inside.

Moreover let us assume for a minute this piece of hardware is in a new type of spy satellite, then it isn't a mount, actuator or Adaptive Optics they are hiding.

If it is identical to a spy satellite hardware, then it would be safe to assume the hardware is used for what a spy satellite is - the Earth below. There is no way a spy satellite would need the same micro control the JWST needs.

And remember he proprietary argument is about the window - we can see images all day long of other proprietary things on the JWST that exist nowhere else, but they aren't being hidden.
 
lots of schizo theories like this don't account for the fact that in the intelligence field, the sources and methods of collection are the most sensitive and most guarded - more sensitive than any information the source or method provides you. if an adversary discovers the method or source, they can close off the method or liquidate that source.
as a result, devices made to collect intelligence often take decades to declassify, since the components or code used to run the machine are transferred to new machines - or, in the internet age, may never be declassified as each new device builds off another older one.
hence, why there's a blur where the magical machine is. the James Webb team probably asked the NRO very, very, politely to use an older, now-outdated - but still potent - piece of surveillance tech that hasn't been declassified.

edit: what it exactly is, we may never know. if I had to guess it's probably an ultra-accurate on-board targeting system to change the direction of the telescope. when dealing in distances measuring hundreds of light-years, when you are millionths of a degree off-target, that may translate to thousands of miles in space and the telescope looking at a whole lot of nothing.
 
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It amazes me that given the nature of this board, how we latch on to anything even sniffing of slightly something untoward, that this discrepancy gets written off as "makes sense".

All of NASAs answers and the contractors are wagging the dog. Even congress that was so vocal about spending 10 billion and was set to cancel the project suddenly all shut the fuck up and paid up. Republicans and Democrats.

If someone wants to equate a spy satellite needing identical components and needs 58 nanometers of adjustment a few hundred miles above Earth, I call bullshit. For a mirror looking 300,000,000,000,000,000 miles sure, 300 miles? Get real.
 
If someone wants to equate a spy satellite needing identical components and needs 58 nanometers of adjustment a few hundred miles above Earth, I call bullshit. For a mirror looking 300,000,000,000,000,000 miles sure, 300 miles? Get real.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm equating it to, given my skills and limited knowledge of the JWST.
It is not out of the realm of possibility that an ultra-sensitive telescope used to look down at Earth probably uses similar, if not the same, components as one that is designed to look into space.
edit: grammar
 
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Yes, that's exactly what I'm equating it to, given my skills limited knowledge of the JWST.
It is not out of the realm of possibility that an ultra-sensitive telescope used to look down at Earth probably uses similar, if not the same, components as one that is designed to look into space.
On the surface I agree. But JWST is a bit different. It is looking for faint Ir signals and has ridiculously low parameters fro inherent heat to avoid over-exposure. It is not the same as Hubble and it is not the same asa spy sat but Ir is an important spectrum but anything looking down at Earth is going to get saturated with mixed signals and improper resolution.

I mean, what exactly is going to be the same as a spy sat?

The mirrors. not a chance. Those are 5 Billion dollars worth of mirrors, if they were the size of the USA the variance in thickness is less than 2". no such precision needed for an orbiting spy sat unless we are looking for terroristic ants.
The Actuators? Not a chance, no such precision required on actuators in Earth Orbit for looking down on Earth. We've got actuators for eons that can do very small movements. Given that Earths surface is relatively flat, there is no need to change the curvature of the primary mirror so actuators needed for a spy satellite primary mirror is not it either - the distance give or take, is much the same for a fixed orbit of a spy sat.
The IR Tech? No way, sure, they would have IR sensors (space spy sats), but no cryogenic units and certainly not a sunshield.

I mean, if we wish to quantify what technology would be used in both -and I can quote the NASA guy who said there is nothing in this thing that isn't State-of-The-Art - then we need to find a plausible piece of equipment that would only be mounted to the vicinity of a secondary mirror that qualifies.

I'm drawing blanks as to what that would be.

So what would a spy sat have at its secondary mirror that would - even when housed and essentially invisible as to workings - be the same as on the JWST because virtually nothing is the same.

Someone out there can shed light on this. What could be at the Secondary Mirror that would be identical to something else on a spy sat that would be considered classified that is not a mount, adaptive optics or actuator?
 
On the surface I agree. But JWST is a bit different. It is looking for faint Ir signals and has ridiculously low parameters fro inherent heat to avoid over-exposure. It is not the same as Hubble and it is not the same asa spy sat but Ir is an important spectrum but anything looking down at Earth is going to get saturated with mixed signals and improper resolution.

I mean, what exactly is going to be the same as a spy sat?

The mirrors. not a chance. Those are 5 Billion dollars worth of mirrors, if they were the size of the USA the variance in thickness is less than 2". no such precision needed for an orbiting spy sat unless we are looking for terroristic ants.
The Actuators? Not a chance, no such precision required on actuators in Earth Orbit for looking down on Earth. We've got actuators for eons that can do very small movements. Given that Earths surface is relatively flat, there is no need to change the curvature of the primary mirror so actuators needed for a spy satellite primary mirror is not it either - the distance give or take, is much the same for a fixed orbit of a spy sat.
The IR Tech? No way, sure, they would have IR sensors (space spy sats), but no cryogenic units and certainly not a sunshield.

I mean, if we wish to quantify what technology would be used in both -and I can quote the NASA guy who said there is nothing in this thing that isn't State-of-The-Art - then we need to find a plausible piece of equipment that would only be mounted to the vicinity of a secondary mirror that qualifies.

I'm drawing blanks as to what that would be.

So what would a spy sat have at its secondary mirror that would - even when housed and essentially invisible as to workings - be the same as on the JWST because virtually nothing is the same.

Someone out there can shed light on this. What could be at the Secondary Mirror that would be identical to something else on a spy sat that would be considered classified that is not a mount, adaptive optics or actuator?
Uranus
 
On the surface I agree. But JWST is a bit different. It is looking for faint Ir signals and has ridiculously low parameters fro inherent heat to avoid over-exposure. It is not the same as Hubble and it is not the same asa spy sat but Ir is an important spectrum but anything looking down at Earth is going to get saturated with mixed signals and improper resolution.

I mean, what exactly is going to be the same as a spy sat?

The mirrors. not a chance. Those are 5 Billion dollars worth of mirrors, if they were the size of the USA the variance in thickness is less than 2". no such precision needed for an orbiting spy sat unless we are looking for terroristic ants.
The Actuators? Not a chance, no such precision required on actuators in Earth Orbit for looking down on Earth. We've got actuators for eons that can do very small movements. Given that Earths surface is relatively flat, there is no need to change the curvature of the primary mirror so actuators needed for a spy satellite primary mirror is not it either - the distance give or take, is much the same for a fixed orbit of a spy sat.
The IR Tech? No way, sure, they would have IR sensors (space spy sats), but no cryogenic units and certainly not a sunshield.

I mean, if we wish to quantify what technology would be used in both -and I can quote the NASA guy who said there is nothing in this thing that isn't State-of-The-Art - then we need to find a plausible piece of equipment that would only be mounted to the vicinity of a secondary mirror that qualifies.

I'm drawing blanks as to what that would be.

So what would a spy sat have at its secondary mirror that would - even when housed and essentially invisible as to workings - be the same as on the JWST because virtually nothing is the same.

Someone out there can shed light on this. What could be at the Secondary Mirror that would be identical to something else on a spy sat that would be considered classified that is not a mount, adaptive optics or actuator?
Off the top of my head - a comms laser would require that degree of sensitivity, especially if you're using it to listen into conversations in moving vehicles (parked vehicles are as trivially easy to laser tap as any room with a window, a moving one is several orders of magnitude more difficult).
Interesting problem to think on.
 
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If someone wants to equate a spy satellite needing identical components and needs 58 nanometers of adjustment a few hundred miles above Earth, I call bullshit. For a mirror looking 300,000,000,000,000,000 miles sure, 300 miles? Get real.
Indeed, the closest we've gotten is Roman Space Telescope (in development, formerly WFIRST), which is the product of a donation by the NRO (see here). In short, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) donated two primary mirrors to NASA, to be repurposed into instruments for astronomical research. These primary mirrors that are comparable to Hubble's. Of course, this is a far cry from turning a space telescope around and pointing it at Earth. It's taken several years of development to repurpose them into better-than-Hubble telescopes. They are expected to launch this decade.
 
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