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 | Hubble Space Telescope (HST) NASA/ESA · 🇺🇸 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 × | Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO) NASA · 🇺🇸 Active · Last updated 2026-06-01Trust: Agency-primaryⓘ Last verified Remove × |
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| Agency | NASA/ESA | NASA/ESA/CSA | NASA |
| Status | Active | Active | Active |
| Wavelength band | multi | infrared | x-ray |
| Launch year | 1990 | 2021 | 1999 |
| Orbit | Low Earth Orbit (LEO) ~547 km | Sun-Earth L2 point (~1.5 million km from Earth) | Highly elliptical (perigee 10,000 km / apogee 140,000 km) |
| Mirror / aperture | 2.4 mas of [1] | 6.5 mas of [1]18 gold-coated beryllium hexagonal segments ↑ Largest | 1.2 mas of [1]Four pairs of nested grazing-incidence mirrors; effective aperture 0.04 m² |
| Mass | 11,110 kgas of [1] ↑ Heaviest | 6,200 kgas of [1]Includes 2,447 kg for the primary mirror assembly | 4,800 kgas of [1]Including HRMA mirror assembly |
| Wavelength range | 0.115–2.5 μm (UV, optical, near-IR) | 0.6–28.5 μm (optical red through mid-IR) | 0.1–10 keV (soft to medium X-ray) |
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| Summary | 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. | 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. | 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. |
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.