Space telescope
우주망원경
A telescope placed in space, outside the Earth's air, to look at stars and galaxies.
Overview
When you look at stars from the ground, the air ripples and blurs the view, and some light is blocked by the air and never arrives. A telescope put in space has none of these problems, so it sees much more clearly and farther. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, showed this power to the world.
The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in December 2021, looks at the universe in infrared light from a point about 1.5 million km from the Earth. Infrared is good for seeing through dust clouds and for seeing very distant galaxies, which means very old ones. A space telescope is hard to repair if it breaks, so it takes a long time and a lot of money to build.
An everyday example
When you open your eyes underwater, the outside looks wavy. You have to lift your head out of the water to see clearly. A space telescope is a telescope that has lifted its head out of the water that is the air.
Why it matters
News that a very distant galaxy was found, or that the air of a planet around another star was studied, comes from here. These are tools for science rather than profit, so they are a leading example of where a country's space budget goes.