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 × | |
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| Agency | NASA/ESA | NASA/ESA/CSA | NASA |
| Status | Active | Active | In Development |
| Wavelength band | multi | infrared | infrared |
| Launch year | 1990 | 2021 | 2027 |
| Orbit | Low Earth Orbit (LEO) ~547 km | Sun-Earth L2 point (~1.5 million km from Earth) | Sun-Earth L2 point |
| Mirror / aperture | 2.4 mas of [1] | 6.5 mas of [1]18 gold-coated beryllium hexagonal segments ↑ Largest | 2.4 mas of [1]Same aperture as Hubble but 100× wider field of view |
| Mass | 11,110 kgas of [1] ↑ Heaviest | 6,200 kgas of [1]Includes 2,447 kg for the primary mirror assembly | ~4,200 kgas of [1]Estimated; uses repurposed NRO mirror donated to NASA |
| Wavelength range | 0.115–2.5 μm (UV, optical, near-IR) | 0.6–28.5 μm (optical red through mid-IR) | 0.48–2.3 μm (optical + NIR) |
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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 next flagship astronomy mission. Roman's 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument (WFI) has Hubble-equivalent resolution but covers 0.28 square degrees per pointing — 100× wider than Hubble. Its 5-year primary mission will census dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanet populations across the Milky Way. |
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.