Hubble | Telescope Blogsphere

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Telescope Space

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

strong>Telescope Space
Why do we use satellites when we have the hubble Space Telescope?

If the Hubble Space Telescope can see trillions of miles to other galaxies then why do we need a satellite to go past Pluto and such?? Wouldn't we just look everywhere with the Telescope???
I need to read up on it !!

Maybe it's located so far away that we send other satellites to look in our Solar System??

Thanks for the link, I'll be educating myself !!

Don't confuse distance with resolution. The things we see with Hubble that are very far away are extremely large -- galaxies, clouds of interstellar gas, etc. But not everything we're interested in is that large. And seeing things with fine grain is a matter of getting physical close to it.

For example, with the Hubble we can see the lunar surface. But the smallest thing we can see CLEARLY at that distance with that instrument is a football stadium. That's because of some hard-and-fast limitations of laws of optics. If the telescope were closer to the Moon -- say orbiting it instead of orbiting the Earth -- it could probably see objects a few inches across.

So by putting spacecraft physically closer to some of the objects we want to look at, we get a finer-grained resolution even if the instruments themselves are not as nice as the Hubble.