Thermal Imaging Satellites - What's the Difference?

Cus: Telescope design was one of the topics i studid in my master's year. And what i was doing at soe satellites was all around the alignment of telescopes and the calebration of telescopes. That sounds like a long way away from working on thermal imagery. Am i right? Or is there some kind of overlep here that i'm not seeing? Because my understanding is itis going to be launching a thermal imagein censer on to a satellite. The actual telescope, or the thermal imaging satellitei thatubas similar to the telescope that's on b satellites. So they're actually ray similar optical and thermal satellites, but the detector technology is quite different.