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 | TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) NASA · 🇺🇸 Active · Last updated 2026-06-01Trust: Agency-primaryⓘ Last verified Remove × | James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) NASA/ESA/CSA · 🇺🇸 Active · Last updated 2026-06-01Trust: Agency-primaryⓘ Last verified Remove × | |
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| Agency | ESA | NASA | NASA/ESA/CSA |
| Status | Active | Active | Active |
| Wavelength band | multi | optical | infrared |
| Launch year | 2023 | 2018 | 2021 |
| Orbit | Sun-Earth L2 point | High Earth orbit (P/2 lunar resonance orbit) | Sun-Earth L2 point (~1.5 million km from Earth) |
| Mirror / aperture | 1.2 mas of [1] | — | 6.5 mas of [1]18 gold-coated beryllium hexagonal segments ↑ Largest |
| Mass | 2,160 kgas of [1] | 362 kgas of [1] | 6,200 kgas of [1]Includes 2,447 kg for the primary mirror assembly ↑ Heaviest |
| Wavelength range | 0.55–2.02 μm (optical VIS + near-IR NISP) | 0.6–1.0 μm (red optical) | 0.6–28.5 μm (optical red through mid-IR) |
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| Summary | 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. | NASA's all-sky transit photometry survey, successor to Kepler. TESS monitors nearly the entire sky in 27-day sectors using four wide-field cameras, targeting the 200,000 brightest stars nearest to Earth. Its targets are close enough for atmospheric follow-up by ground telescopes and JWST. | The most powerful space telescope ever launched. Operating at -233°C at the L2 point, JWST can observe the universe's first light from ~100 million years after the Big Bang. Its first full-color images, released July 2022, immediately set records for the most distant galaxies observed. |
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.