Comparing the Hubble and Webb Space Telescopes
Department:
Astrotech
Teaser:
The Webb telescope is much larger than Hubble and is better understood as a successor to and improvement on the Hubble telescope.
Link:
Source:
Bad Astronomy Download time: Jun 16 2010 8:34 AM ET
Hubble is an awesome 'scope, but its life is limited. Heavy and huge, there's no way to bring it back, and with the Shuttle retiring there's no easy way to get to it. Eventually its gyros will fail, it won't be able to be pointed, and then that's that.
For the past few years, NASA has been working on the James Webb Space Telescope, what some people call Hubble's "replacement", which is a misnomer: it's actually Hubble's successor. It will do amazing astronomy too, but it has different capabilities than its predecessor.…
See Bad Astronomy for links to further info.
See this NASA page for a more detailed comparison of the two telescopes.
