Other Space Telescopes

There are many other telescopes both launched and in the plans. Some of these are interesting.

One is the Astrosat, a multi-wavelength telescope launched on September 28, 2015 by ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organization. This amazing device was built to monitor celestial objects in UV and X-ray parts of the spectrum. Of particular interest are X-ray binaries and pulsars.

The BRITE constellation is a series of six nano-satellites launched from 2013 to 2014 by a consortium of Canada, Poland and Austria. These are designed to measure the light from bright stars in single wavelengths.

The Kepler Mission instrument was launched by NASA on March 6, 2009, and it's designed to find Earth-like planets orbiting stars. So far, it has found over a thousand planets that are Earth-like.

The MOST telescope was launched by the CSA on June 30, 2003, and has been called the Humble telescope (a amusing reference to the Hubble). It was designed to monitor the variation in brightness of major stars.

NEOSSat is the Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite launched by the CSA on February 25, 2013. It's main mission is to locate near-Earth asteroids that are difficult to see because they obit between the Sun and Earth. It also keeps track of high-orbiting satellites.

Swift is a robotic satellite, short for Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission, which NASA launched November 20, 2004. Swift's mission is to study gamma-ray bursts from various sources and determine their origin. The reason that this is important is because sometimes gamma-ray bursts are short lived and could come from any direction in space. This device uses UV, X-ray and visible light telescopes, and it has made some notable discoveries of supernovae.

The Gala mission satellite is a product of the ESA and its mission is to map the sky in three dimensions, determining motions and spectral properties of many astronomical objects. Basically, it will determine our position among the many stars of our galaxy.

Of course, China is planning on a space telescope even larger that the James Webb mission.

There are even greater planned telescopes, but many are subject to monetary restrictions. We'll just have to wait and see.

Thanks for reading.