Wenn ein Teleskop ein Risiko für die nationale Sicherheit darstellt

Ross Andersen: “In the early months of 2023, the astronomer Željko Ivezić found himself taking part in a highly unusual negotiation. Ivezić is the 59-year-old director of the Vera Rubin Observatory, a $1 billion telescope that the United States has been developing in the Chilean high desert for more than 20 years. He was trying to reach an agreement that would keep his telescope from compromising America’s national security when it starts stargazing next year.

“This task was odd enough for any scientist, and it was made more so by the fact that Ivezić had no idea with whom he was negotiating. ‘I didn’t even know which agency I was talking to,’ he told me on a recent video call from his field office in Chile. Whoever it was would communicate with him only through intermediaries at the National Science Foundation. Ivezić didn’t even know whether one person or several people were on the other side of the exchange. All he knew was that they were very security-minded. Also, they seemed to know a great deal about astronomy.

“The Vera Rubin is housed in a sleek building on a mountaintop in the Atacama Desert. The chamber that holds its primary mirror juts up from the end of the elongated structure like the head of a sphinx. The observatory represents a freakish augmentation of human vision. Like the James Webb Space Telescope that NASA launched a few years ago, it will be able to see to the far edge of the universe. But the Webb can observe only a tiny region of sky. The Vera Rubin will be able to lock onto a tile of sky that is much larger and, after 30 seconds, return an image of that tile that extends 13 billion light-years into space. Then it will pan over and lock onto an adjacent tile of sky and do the same thing. After just three nights of going tile-by-tile like a handyman redoing a bathroom wall, it will have captured a deep image of the entire sky.

“National-security types worry about what the Vera Rubin will be able to see. Ivezić told me that each of its full-sky images will contain more than 40 billion objects. That’s several times more than all previous surveys of this sort combined. When the Vera Rubin sees an object that it hasn’t seen before, it will alert astronomers. If a star explodes billions of light-years away, an algorithm will spot it, and the community will be notified. If a near-Earth asteroid comes hurtling right toward us, scientists will know to zoom into it, immediately, with other observatories. The problem is, if a spy satellite, or some other secret spacecraft, moves into view, that too could get flagged and have its location distributed, in real time, to people all across the world.

“The Pentagon doesn’t like much of anything to be known about its satellites … The U.S. acknowledges the general contours of its nuclear arsenal—how many weapons and delivery vehicles it has—but tends to be far more circumspect about its military space capabilities … The very existence of the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency responsible for developing U.S. spy satellites, was classified until 1992. The NRO still operates a fleet of these satellites, but exact details about how many, and what kind, remain secret. The Vera Rubin Observatory will likely make awkward eye contact with some of them.”

Read more here: [https://theatln.tc/Tf7tBU96](https://theatln.tc/Tf7tBU96)