NASA gets two military spy telescopes for astronomy - The WashingtonPost.

On 17/05/2013 6:22 PM, Robert Clark wrote:
Excellent news:

NASA May Launch Donated Spy Satellite Telescope to Mars.
by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior WriterDate: 15 May 2013 Time: 04:30 AM
ET
[quote]
The NRO's gift to NASA of unused spy satellites could enable a new
project termed MOST, or Mars-Orbiting Space Telescope.
...
As it's currently envisioned, MOST would have three main science
instruments — an imaging spectral mapper, a high-resolution imager and
an ultraviolet spectrometer — allowing it to make a broad range of
detailed observations.
The mapper would have a spatial resolution of 0.7 feet (0.21 m)
per pixel at an orbiting altitude of 250 miles (400 kilometers),
McEwen said. That's about 100 times better than the resolution
achieved by a similar instrument aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter (MRO), which has been circling the Red Planet since 2006.

Hey, why not? As a spy satellite it was originally intended to look down
on the ground on Earth, now it can still look down on the ground, on
Mars this time.

Launching so much long-term satellite equipment on the various Solar
System bodies, like Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, etc. are really
putting our flag down on our ownership of this entire Solar System, not
just Earth.

Looking beyond Mars
MOST would also be built to look up and out, beyond the Red Planet
and its two tiny moons.
The telescope's UV spectrometer is envisioned to be similar to
that of the Hubble Space Telescope. But MOST likely wouldn't be able
to study extremely distant objects as well as the famous HST, because
installing a Hubble-like guidance and navigation system that allows a
prolonged lock on such faint targets would raise the price tag
significantly, McEwen said.
Instead, MOST may be optimized to view planets and moons in the
outer solar system.

Yeah, who needs it? We're going to have JWST pretty soon too look at the
long-distance objects anyways, this way you can concentrate JWST's
resources on stuff outside the solar system, and this thing can look at
stuff inside it.

Yousuf Khan