'I think maybe there was some concern that, you know, you don't want images that end up looking wispy,' Pontoppidan said. Some gas and dust features become a bit wispy as you start to edge into the infrared light part of the spectrum, Pontoppidan explained. 'The stars themselves fade away they get fainter and fainter go to longer wavelength, but interstellar clouds go brighter and brighter and brighter.' 'It will look very, very different than Hubble,' Pontoppidan said. 'I think it'll be fantastic,' Pontoppidan said, 'but it's very difficult to predict what it will look like,' as this will be the first space telescope mission of its kind. Kornmesser)īy observing in infrared, Webb will capture uniquely beautiful images. Beauty in infraredĬomparison of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope's respective mirrors.

While Hubble observes light at primarily optical and ultraviolet wavelengths, Webb is designed to detect primarily infrared light. But, while better in ways, Webb's images will also be fundamentally 'different, because it's different wavelengths,' Pontoppidan said. 'It will take amazing images they will be better than what Hubble did,' Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said during a news conference in May. Hubble is pretty close to us in low Earth orbit, but Webb will travel out much farther, to a gravitationally stable spot 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth known as the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 (L2).Īdditionally, while both Hubble and Webb are large space telescopes (though Webb is considerably bigger), the two actually 'see' the universe very differently. But despite a handful of glitches over the years, Hubble's science instruments are still going strong, and the two big scopes are set to observe together (albeit far apart from one another) in space. Webb is often described as Hubble's replacement or successor.

Hubble telescope vs james webb