NASA gets NRO hand-me-downs

The news broke yesterday morning in the Washington Post and the New York Times: early this year National Reconnaissance Office, one of the US Government's plethora of intelligence agencies called up NASA and offered them a pair of telescopes found lying around. The two have a similar mirror size to the Hubble's, but are designed with a much wider field of view -- the assumption being that these telescopes were designed to look down, not up. This particular technology transfer from military to civilian agency highlights the disconnect between technological development in these two spheres. I have two big questions: If this is the NRO's trash, what do they have now? And now that NASA has these, what next? Evidently, all the excitement may be for naught. "NASA is very excited by these telescopes, but does not presently have the science budget to do much with them," said Katie Hamren, Astronomy PhD student at UC Santa Cruz, "so we'll see what happens."