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 × | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agency | NASA/ESA | NASA | NASA/ESA/CSA |
| Status | Active | Retired | Active |
| Wavelength band | multi | infrared | infrared |
| Launch year | 1990 | 2003 – 2020 | 2021 |
| Orbit | Low Earth Orbit (LEO) ~547 km | Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit | Sun-Earth L2 point (~1.5 million km from Earth) |
| Mirror / aperture | 2.4 mas of [1] | 0.85 mas of [1] | 6.5 mas of [1]18 gold-coated beryllium hexagonal segments ↑ Largest |
| Mass | 11,110 kgas of [1] ↑ Heaviest | 950 kgas of [1] | 6,200 kgas of [1]Includes 2,447 kg for the primary mirror assembly |
| Wavelength range | 0.115–2.5 μm (UV, optical, near-IR) | 3.6–160 μm (mid-to-far infrared) | 0.6–28.5 μm (optical red through mid-IR) |
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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 infrared Great Observatory, operating 2003–2020. Best known for discovering the TRAPPIST-1 system of 7 Earth-sized planets, including 3 in the habitable zone (with ground telescopes). Ran out of cryogen in 2009 but continued 'warm mission' until retirement in January 2020. | 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.