DARPA's New Hi-Tech Telescope 89
coondoggie writes "You can bet that if there are little red aliens running around on Mars, or spaceships patrolling other planets in our solar system for that matter, a recently powered-up telescope built by researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency might just be able to see them. The Air Force, which operates the DARPA-developed Space Surveillance Telescope says the telescope's design, featuring unique image-capturing technology known as a curved charge coupled device system, as well as very wide field-of-view, large-aperture optics, doesn't require the long optics train of a more traditional telescopes."
Re:I wonder what the Air Force needs to track... (Score:5, Informative)
Air Force has huge departments dedicated to space.
http://www.afspc.af.mil/units/index.asp
They manage GPS satellites as well as scan the skies and catalog 10's of thousands of pieces of space debris.
Re:Joking? (Score:5, Informative)
You can bet that if there are little red aliens running around on Mars...
You're joking, right? That telescope is going to be pointed at little humans of all colors running around on Earth.
You're joking, right? You know it's a telescope and not a satellite.
article on curved focal surfaces (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.ptbmagazine.com/content/040103_ora.html [ptbmagazine.com]
GEODSS replacement? (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like a replacement for GEODSS. [janes.com]
GEODSS, from 1980, was the first fully computerized telescope system. It basically looks at the sky, section by section, subtracts out all known objects, and reports the rest. So it finds new satellites, space junk, and even dark objects that occult stars. Three GEODSS sites are still running; a fourth is loaned out to Lincoln Labs to find and track near-Earth asteroids. [mit.edu] (Somewhat to the annoyance of astronomers who had been discovering comets and asteroids manually, the automated Lincoln Labs GEODSS discovered them by the thousands.) Each site has at least two identical telescopes, and some have a wide-angle Schmidt.
One of the less-often mentioned features of GEODSS is that it can illuminate a target. One telescope can be used to aim a laser at an object in low orbit, to get a clear picture of darker objects.