The next great space telescope.

Space telescopes are not all the same, they have different observation tools and instruments, in reality they are platforms equipped with different equipment and filters, there are observatories specialized simply in monitoring the sun, others in X-rays, others in radio waves, others in infrared which by the way is one of James Webb's many specialties.

But soon we will have a gigantic gravitational wave observatory thanks to the LISA, I say gigantic and perhaps I will be an understatement because you will see the LISA will consist of three spacecraft, each separated by 2 and a half million kilometers, more than six times the distance that separates the land of the moon.

These ships will form a triangle that will act as a single gravitational wave observatory, the key will be in three special pieces, three solid cubes of gold and platinum, each one in a ship and connected by means of laser rays in this way it can be measured with extreme precision. precision the undulation of the fabric of space-time that causes the passage of gravitational waves, coming from colossal events caused by very massive objects and by cosmic events such as supernova explosions, mergers of hyperdense stars, mergers of neutron stars, mergers of holes blacks and perhaps some phenomenon that we are now unaware of.

Because whenever we have looked at the universe with different eyes we have discovered new things. This observatory will be in space in 2035 and is a project led by the European space agency, but in which NASA and an international consortium of scientists also participate.

Other space observatories are dedicated to massive data surveys, an example was the Kepler space telescope, which entered service in 2009 and its mission ended in 2016. In those years, it simultaneously observed 150,000 stars and analyzed their brightness every 30 minutes to detect possible transits of planets.

The enormous amount of data collected continues to be a subject of study and will continue to provide discoveries in the coming years. If we do not rescue Hubble we will lose an extraordinary tool for astronomy, a tool that will be very difficult to replace, the true successor of Hubble, the one that will be closer to its characteristics and purposes could be the LUVOIR space telescope proposed by NASA.

LUVOIR, a general-purpose observatory like Hubble, will be able to observe at multiple wavelengths including infrared, optical and ultraviolet, but LUVOIR has funding problems and will likely not be launched before 2039 and much sooner next year. In 2025 China plans to launch its bet, a very powerful space telescope called Shun Tiang.

This telescope will have an initial planned mission of about 10 years, with objectives very similar to Hubble, although it will be much more powerful and with much more modern technology, the Shun Tiang can observe an area of ​​space between 300 to 350 times larger than what Hubble can do and it also has a novel feature, which no other space telescope has at the moment, and that is that it is designed so that it can take over the Chinese space station that will orbit at the same altitude as the telescope.

This means that the Chinese space telescope can be easily reviewed and updated, we owe many discoveries to Hubble, let's hope they don't let it fall, and that it continues to be one of our eyes in the cosmos.