Pick up to 4 telescopes to compare side-by-side. State lives in the URL — share the link and the comparison loads exactly as you left it.
Space telescope data has underpinned 1.5 million+ scientific papers since 1990.
| Attribute | Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO) NASA · 🇺🇸 Active · Last updated 2026-06-01Trust: Agency-primaryⓘ Last verified Remove × | Hubble Space Telescope (HST) NASA/ESA · 🇺🇸 Active · Last updated 2026-06-01Trust: Agency-primaryⓘ Last verified Remove × | |
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| Agency | NASA | NASA/ESA | ESA |
| Status | Active | Active | Active |
| Wavelength band | x-ray | multi | multi |
| Launch year | 1999 | 1990 | 2023 |
| Orbit | Highly elliptical (perigee 10,000 km / apogee 140,000 km) | Low Earth Orbit (LEO) ~547 km | Sun-Earth L2 point |
| Mirror / aperture | 1.2 mas of [1]Four pairs of nested grazing-incidence mirrors; effective aperture 0.04 m² | 2.4 mas of [1] ↑ Largest | 1.2 mas of [1] |
| Mass | 4,800 kgas of [1]Including HRMA mirror assembly | 11,110 kgas of [1] ↑ Heaviest | 2,160 kgas of [1] |
| Wavelength range | 0.1–10 keV (soft to medium X-ray) | 0.115–2.5 μm (UV, optical, near-IR) | 0.55–2.02 μm (optical VIS + near-IR NISP) |
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| Summary | NASA's flagship X-ray telescope and one of the Great Observatories. Chandra's angular resolution is 100× better than previous X-ray telescopes, enabling detailed imaging of supernovae remnants, galaxy clusters, and the region around supermassive black holes. Still operating after 25+ years despite being designed for a 5-year mission. | The most scientifically productive telescope ever built. Launched in 1990 and serviced five times by Space Shuttle crews, Hubble has logged over 1.6 million observations and contributed to more than 21,000 peer-reviewed publications. Its image of the Hubble Deep Field fundamentally changed our understanding of galaxy formation. | ESA's dark energy explorer, launched July 1, 2023. Euclid will map the 3D distribution of ~1.5 billion galaxies across a third of the sky over 6 years, measuring dark energy and dark matter with unprecedented precision. Its first science-quality images, released February 2024, demonstrated exceptional optics. |
All 9 major space telescopes with primary-source citations from NASA, ESA, STScI, and JPL. Pure URL state — bookmark or share the link and the comparison reproduces exactly.