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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Agency | NASA | NASA | ESA |
| Status | Retired | In Development | Active |
| Wavelength band | infrared | infrared | multi |
| Launch year | 2003 – 2020 | 2027 | 2023 |
| Orbit | Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit | Sun-Earth L2 point | Sun-Earth L2 point |
| Mirror / aperture | 0.85 mas of [1] | 2.4 mas of [1]Same aperture as Hubble but 100× wider field of view ↑ Largest | 1.2 mas of [1] |
| Mass | 950 kgas of [1] | ~4,200 kgas of [1]Estimated; uses repurposed NRO mirror donated to NASA ↑ Heaviest | 2,160 kgas of [1] |
| Wavelength range | 3.6–160 μm (mid-to-far infrared) | 0.48–2.3 μm (optical + NIR) | 0.55–2.02 μm (optical VIS + near-IR NISP) |
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| Summary | 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. | 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. | 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. |
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.