AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Atop a mountain in the high desert of Chile, the U.S. has been developing a very, very powerful telescope connected to the world's largest digital camera. Once fully operational, the Vera Rubin Observatory will be able to produce a full image of the entire sky every three days. It will document galaxies, exploding stars and black holes up to 13 billion light years away. But in doing so, it could also capture images of things that are much, much closer, like spy satellites and other spacecraft that the U.S. would rather the world not know about. Ross Andersen wrote about all of this for The Atlantic and is here with more. Welcome.
ROSS ANDERSEN: Thanks for having me, Ailsa.
CHANG: So just explain originally what sorts of scientific observations was this telescope designed for. Like, how does it differ from the work of, say, the James Webb Space Telescope?
ANDERSEN: So let's stay on the James Webb Space Telescope that was launched by NASA a few years ago. And it has a very small field of view, which means that it can only look at a tiny portion of the sky at one time. The Vera Rubin Observatory, this new telescope in Chile, will be able to look at an enormous tile of the sky at one time - 40 times the size of the full moon. And so by going tile by tile over three nights, it'll give us an image of the entire sky, which means over its 10-year run time, it will be able to tell us whenever something new shows up in the sky.
CHANG: I love that imagery, by the way - tile by tile. It's like they're assembling a bathroom wall with this telescope...
ANDERSEN: (Laughter) Yes.
CHANG: ...Which is the sky. OK, well, let's explain the issue here for the U.S. government. If astronomers take photos of deep outer space from Earth, they might unintentionally get photo bombed - right? - by something like a satellite orbiting the Earth. Is that right? Explain the problem.
ANDERSEN: Yes, that's exactly right. So how it's going to work is that in each of those all-sky images, they will compare to previous images of that same portion of the sky, right? And if they see the stars that are normally there, great. If they see something new, however, they want astronomers all over the planet to know immediately so that they can point their own telescopes at it. But the problem is it can also be a spy satellite or other secret spacecraft that the U.S. has or other countries have up in orbit. And the government, the Pentagon in particular, doesn't much like that.
CHANG: OK. Well, your story is largely told through this one astronomer who has communicated with the U.S. government about this challenge. Tell us who he is. And what did he reveal to you about the negotiations he has had with government officials?
ANDERSEN: His name is Zeljko Ivesic, and he is the director of the Vera Rubin Observatory. And basically, a U.S. agency, which he doesn't even know which one it was - got in touch with him in early 2023 to work out this problem. And he was actually negotiating with them entirely through intermediaries. Like, he just had no idea who he was talking to, but they had very serious requirements.
CHANG: OK. And then what was the eventual solution that he and these non-discrete government officials reached, as best as you can describe it?
ANDERSEN: For this system, they kind of did an ingenious workaround. And what it was is every time the telescope takes an image down in Chile, it gets routed to a secure facility in California, and all the new objects in the image are flagged. And most of those flags, most of those alerts go right to the astronomy community globally, but it holds back the secret ones. It knows where those satellites are. So it has an automated system that picks them out and says, oh, don't send those. But three days later, the entire image is sent to astronomers. So there's no, like, total redaction. It's just an embargo. So the real risk was real-time information about where they are. Even, like, the best astronomers can't infer where they are now from, like, a three-day-old image.
CHANG: That's pretty cool. Well, here's the thing that I've been wondering, though. If spying in space is potentially fruitful for any government, I imagine that there are foreign telescopes out there doing some spying in space right now, telescopes that the U.S. cannot place constraints on. So is the U.S. government, by trying to control, say, the Vera Rubin Observatory, just plugging up a leak in a larger leaky boat? Do you know what I mean?
ANDERSEN: Yeah. You know, I do not have exhaustive knowledge of the kind of counterintelligence...
CHANG: (Laughter.)
ANDERSEN: ...That these other countries might have.
CHANG: I'm so surprised.
ANDERSEN: But you raise a good point. But, yes, I think that's right. I think also it's the power of this telescope, right? It's the detail of what you can see in these images that pose that risk and just having it be public. Like, it's one thing for an intelligence agency to have that overseas, and it's another thing for, like, every astronomer everywhere to have it.
CHANG: That is Ross Andersen. His story in The Atlantic is called "When A Telescope Is A National Security Risk." Thank you so much for your reporting.
ANDERSEN: Thanks for having me on, Ailsa. That was great. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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