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 × | TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) NASA · 🇺🇸 Active · Last updated 2026-06-01Trust: Agency-primaryⓘ Last verified Remove × | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agency | NASA/ESA | NASA | NASA |
| Status | Active | In Development | Active |
| Wavelength band | multi | infrared | optical |
| Launch year | 1990 | 2027 | 2018 |
| Orbit | Low Earth Orbit (LEO) ~547 km | Sun-Earth L2 point | High Earth orbit (P/2 lunar resonance orbit) |
| Mirror / aperture | 2.4 mas of [1] ↑ Largest | 2.4 mas of [1]Same aperture as Hubble but 100× wider field of view ↑ Largest | — |
| Mass | 11,110 kgas of [1] ↑ Heaviest | ~4,200 kgas of [1]Estimated; uses repurposed NRO mirror donated to NASA | 362 kgas of [1] |
| Wavelength range | 0.115–2.5 μm (UV, optical, near-IR) | 0.48–2.3 μm (optical + NIR) | 0.6–1.0 μm (red optical) |
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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. | 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. | 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. |
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.