French inventor N. Cassegrain might be stunned to know his 1672 reflecting-telescope design, which was criticized by Newton at the time, is orbiting Earth in a satellite telescope called Hubble .
No matter how big ground-based telescopes get, they will always face the issue of distortion caused by Earth's atmosphere. A smaller telescope deposited in space, beyond Earth's atmosphere, can avoid the issue entirely. The Hubble Space Telescope combines astronomy with rocket science and operates in Earth's orbit.
With an aperture of 2.4 meters (94.5 inches), Hubble is much smaller than state-of-the-art ground telescopes, but its resolution is comparable or better, since the light it collects has travelled only through the relative vacuum of space. Hubble captures faint light coming in from billions of light years from Earth, which means it can see events that occurred billions of years ago. Hubble helped scientists confirm that dark matter exists and narrow down the age of the universe to 13 or 14 billion years.
Hubble captures incredible images of the universe, but it's not the best space telescope out there. The Chandra X-ray Observatory tops Hubble in revealing the hidden world.
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