Thomas Paine Space Telescope

Thomas Paine Space Telescope
General Information
Alias	Thomas Paine orbital telescope
Type	Space telescope
Operator
Location	Low Earth orbit (S3) L2 Sun-Earth (S4) (see also: BTS)
Purpose	Astronomical research
Crewed	No
History
First used	Around 1988
Upgrades	Repairs: Mid July 1992
Patch

The Thomas Paine Space Telescope (TPST) is a powerful telescope in Earth's orbit. It is named in the honor of the late NASA administrator Thomas Paine, and was launched aboard a Pathfinder shuttle some time before 1989.

The space telescope is operated by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

History

In mid July 1992, the Space Shuttle Enterprise was sent for a mission to do repairs on the telescope, which were successfully completed on July 17.

After the turn of the millennium, the telescope was used to identify and map asteroids as candidates for mining.

In 2003, NASA astronomers detected an unknown asteroid in the vicinity of Jupiter on images taken by the telescope. The object was given the designation 2003LC and further studies assumed it to contain an estimate of 70,000 metric tons of iridium, worth $20 trillion, which led to the asteroid be named "Goldilocks".

Gallery

TV broadcast about the launch of the TPST

Former NASA administrator Thomas Paine

Paine Telescope maps asteroids (late 90s)

TPST communication array

Data dawnload from TPST

Season 3 patch, showing Hubble (see BTS below)

Season 4 patch (embroidery)

Behind the scenes

There are several discrepancies concerning the Thomas Paine Space Telescope:

The footage used for the telescope both in the bonus video 1989 and in the press review of episode 3x01 showed footage of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of our timeline, which was launched on December 25, 2021, 14 years later than initially planned, and half a year before season 3 premiered. The mission patch, however, showed the Hubble Space Telescope. The patch was created at the beginning of production of season 3 and is the one used on set. Probably, after the successful launch of the JWST, they decided to use footage from JWST instead of Hubble.

The problem with this is that the James Webb Telescope operates at the Sun–Earth L₂ Lagrange point, which is about 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth, about 4 times the distance to the Moon, but the Thomas Paine telescope (in season 3) is located in low Earth orbit, as seen on mission status boards throughout the season, like the Hubble telescope is in reality. However, despite it being mentioned and shown to be in LEO during season 3, in season 4 the telescope is shown to be much farther away. From the size of Earth as seen from the telescope's perspective, it seems now to be located way beyond lunar orbit, which would now match the location of the real JWST. For season 4, they also created a new patch which now shows a telescope looking like the JWST.

So the telescope changed from being in low Earth orbit in S3 to a location way beyond lunar orbit in S4, which technically would not be possible.

See also

• Thomas Paine
• Skylab
• MoonLab