This Thursday (April 24), the Hubble Space Telescope celebrates 35 years in space — and even though Hubble has continuously delivered stunning space images and vital data since 1990, it isn’t unfair to ask whether the instrument can still deliver goods with the same level of quality. Thirty-five years of age for a space telescope is no joke.
So, can Hubble still hold its own and prove itself useful when compared to other, more recently built space instruments like NASA’s $10 billion golden goose, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)?
Well, as it appears, the answer is yes.
Kurt Retherford is a Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientist who argues that Hubble can still hold its own. For instance, he recently used the long-serving space telescope as part of a program to study the solar system’s most volcanic body” Jupiter’s moon Io.
“It’s amazing that after 35 years, Hubble still holds a unique capability as a top workhorse for science discoveries and publications,” Retherford told Space.com. “The requested time amongst scientists to use this facility remains several times higher than the time being competed for, meaning only the best of the best ideas for observations are conducted.”
Did the JWST make Hubble obsolete? No way!
Of course, when talking about space telescopes and their usefulness, we have to mention the $10 billion elephant in the room: the JWST.
Why do we still need Hubble with the JWST out there? The answer concerns the way these two revolutionary instruments use the electromagnetic spectrum to see the cosmos.
“Hubble is different than JWST in that it is great at imaging both the visible light that we see with our eyes and light at ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths, even shorter and more energetic than the light that gives us sunburns,” Retherford said. “JWST, on the other hand, is optimized to detect infrared light, even at thermal temperatures that are even redder than night-vision goggles use. Both are big telescopes, but they are very different in these ways.”
As Retherford pointed out, in terms of the wavelengths of light these two telescopes are optimized to observe, the JWST in fact picks up where Hubble leaves off.
That means that the observations conducted with these two space…
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