Ever since Galileo’s telescope, there have been some pretty big milestones when it comes to shaping the new face of telescopes. They started off on the ground looking at stars and nearby planets, and now we have telescopes that orbit earth and are looking for planets in other solar systems. So let’s briefly go over some of the more famous telescopes of the world that have helped scientists learn more about how everything works and came to be.
The Hubble
Probably the most famous telescope of all time – and has done more for astronomy and science than any other telescope that has been commissioned. The Hubble telescope was launched in 1990, and since it has been upgraded and worked on many times, recently had a major and final upgrade in 2010. For the longest time, the Hubble telescope was the most powerful telescope ever made orbiting around the Earth.
Spitzer Space Telescope
This magnificent telescope follows Earth around the sun, hanging out about 92,000,000 miles from us. What makes this telescope so unique that it acquires images in infrared instead of using direct light to view stuff. Also since it is so far away from Earth it misses all of the atmospheric distortion that other telescopes have to deal with.
The Kepler Mission
This is a massive telescope that is more than 5 astronomical units away from Earth. It’s main mission is to find stars that have planets that are similar to Earth. The Kepler telescope will stare at more than 100,000 stars for a period of 3.5 years, or up to 6 years, and hopefully by the end of the mission we will have a better idea of how common earthlike planets are in our galaxy.
As we progress in technology we can only expect the future is going to hold some of the most extraordinary telescopes that we could have only dreamed about. Even though we have telescopes orbiting the planet, on top of the highest mountains, there is still a lot of space out there that is not visible and cannot be monitored, this is where the amateur astronomers come in to play, so do some research, buy a telescope, and join the fun of discovering new things in space.