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 | TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) NASA · 🇺🇸 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 × | Hubble Space Telescope (HST) NASA/ESA · 🇺🇸 Active · Last updated 2026-06-01Trust: Agency-primaryⓘ Last verified Remove × |
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| Agency | NASA | NASA | NASA/ESA |
| Status | Active | Active | Active |
| Wavelength band | optical | x-ray | multi |
| Launch year | 2018 | 1999 | 1990 |
| Orbit | High Earth orbit (P/2 lunar resonance orbit) | Highly elliptical (perigee 10,000 km / apogee 140,000 km) | Low Earth Orbit (LEO) ~547 km |
| Mirror / aperture | — | 1.2 mas of [1]Four pairs of nested grazing-incidence mirrors; effective aperture 0.04 m² | 2.4 mas of [1] ↑ Largest |
| Mass | 362 kgas of [1] | 4,800 kgas of [1]Including HRMA mirror assembly | 11,110 kgas of [1] ↑ Heaviest |
| Wavelength range | 0.6–1.0 μm (red optical) | 0.1–10 keV (soft to medium X-ray) | 0.115–2.5 μm (UV, optical, near-IR) |
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| Summary | 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. | 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. | 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. |
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.