Re:25-Dec. Shout-out to everyone else at work
by sandworm101 on Saturday December 25, 2021 @05:53PM
(#29687784)
>> probably won't be a big telescope.
It will be another infrared telescope. Hubble's capabilities have been all but surpassed by ground-based optics. Some of the new giant telescopes already being built will easily surpass Hubble (100+foot mirrors etc). What JWST does is see in infrared, something that ground-based telescopes can never do as IR is absorbed by atmosphere. So whatever replaces JWST will likely be another, bigger, IR telescope.
https://www.tmt.org/page/about
>>With its 30m diameter prime-mirror, TMT will be three times as wide, with nine times more area, than the largest currently existing visible-light telescope in the world. This will provide an unparalleled resolution, with TMT images more than 12 times sharper than those from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Whatever follows probably won't be a big telescope. It'll be all the little experiments that couldn't find funding over those 30 years because there was nothing to launch them without breaking the budget. There's a lot of progress deferred because every launch had to be big.