Hubble is the Queen Mother of space telescopes, a silver fireplug floating in space with a pair of 23-foot-long solar panels that have kept it in the hunt for more than 30 years. Though wildly expensive to build, space telescopes generate images unencumbered by the light pollution and atmospheric distortion that ground-based telescopes must deal with. Manager: NASA/Space Telescope Science Institute | First light: | Location: Low Earth orbit | Altitude: 333 miles | Mirror diameter: 2.4 meters Since their debut in the early 1990s, the pair have used their 10-meter mirrors to hunt planets around distant stars, explore the depths of black holes, and investigate the evolution of the universe. (The latter would be too heavy to maintain its precise shape.) The telescopes can be used independently or in unison, operating as a single instrument with an aperture equivalent to their 280-foot combined width.
This was made possible by the introduction of active optics, which uses smaller mirror segments that are independently computer-aligned and adjusted, rather than trying to create a rigid single-piece mirror of the same size. The dual telescopes of the Keck Observatory-a gleaming pair of 98-foot-tall golf balls sitting atop a dormant volcano in Hawaii-were the first of the modern era of big-mirror telescopes.
Manager: California Association for Research in Astronomy | First light: Keck I, NovemKeck II, Janu| Location: Mauna Kea, Hawaii | Altitude: 13,796 feet | Mirror diameter: 10 meters each, comprising 36 hexagonal segments, each 6 feet across and 3 inches thick These are the instruments that keep astronomers up all night. These mega-telescopes usually benefit from vast international partnerships, with participating governments and research organizations contributing to design, funding, and management in exchange for “time at the eyepiece” and the perpetual collaboration of some of the greatest minds in the known universe. “The Giant Magellan Telescope and the Extremely Large Telescope are being built in Chile.” As for the future? “The next big leap in technology is going to be very big, and it’s coming soon-as in, by the end of this decade, when several huge telescopes will be coming online,” Fienberg says. We’ve assessed the capabilities and accomplishments of each, from so-called first light-their debut moments following construction-through today. Every Image From the James Webb Space TelescopeĪmong the dozens of superpowerful telescopes across the globe (and orbiting it), these are the biggest and best.“The camera on the 8.4-meter telescope of the upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory has 3.2 billion pixels!” That’s the largest digital camera ever built. “When I was a grad student in the 1980s, a typical digital camera on a telescope had less than 100,000 pixels,” Fienberg says. Modern telescopes also capitalize on the same steady technological progress that has rendered our own smartphones exceedingly capable. “If your goal is to observe a radio source at the highest possible resolution, you want to use a radio interferometer, which is a collection of smaller dishes spread out over an area much larger than anyone could build a single dish.” “A bigger telescope collects more light and sees the universe at higher resolution than a small telescope, but if your goal is to detect X-rays from around a black hole, a small X-ray telescope is better than a large optical telescope,” notes Rick Fienberg, a senior advisor to the American Astronomical Society. Their targets often define their sizes and configurations. Most use large mirrors to reflect light into sensors, and most sit on mountaintops high above the thicker atmosphere below. Though the astronomer peering thoughtfully into an eyepiece is a scenario from the past (data is processed digitally now), telescopes remain broadly recognizable.
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These world-class telescopes represent decades of innovative thinking, with clever design strategies and brilliant software solutions aimed at hunting down answers to cosmic queries. The resulting imagery, whether it’s an extraordinary first-ever look at a black hole or an intriguing first-time hint of a planet in a distant galaxy, captivates both the public and the scientists who dig into their prodigious data streams. Wilson observatories to Keck and La Silla, and now overhead as Hubble and Webb-aims massive mirrors and excruciatingly sensitive instruments around the heavens with the precision of a seasoned archer. This optical marvel-found in locations ranging from the early Kitt Peak and Mt. Few scientific tools are as productive, publicly revered, and seemingly infinitely capable as the humble observatory telescope.
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