Sometime within the next week of me recording this episode, hopefully, a rocket will be launched from the European Space Agency's facility in French Guyana.

On it, will be NASA's latest and greatest space telescope. It's unlike anything which has ever been launched in space before and if

successful it will allow us to see further than we ever have. Learn more with the

James Webb Space Telescope and how it will radically advanced astronomy on this episode of

Everything Everywhere Daily. If you're familiar with any space telescope, you're probably familiar with the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Hubble looks like a telescope.

There's a mirror at the bottom of a very long tube, and it has some solar panels on the side,

and it zips around the Earth's orbit. The Hubble mirror is 2.4 meters or 7 feet 10 inches in diameter.

Since it was launched into orbit on the space shuttle 31 years ago, it has revolutionized astronomy. Putting a telescope into space

has tons of advantages over ground-based telescopes. Space telescopes operate in

the vacuum of space and never have to worry about atmospheric interference.

There's no dust that will ever collect on the mirror,

and you never have to worry about cloud cover.

The Hubble is located in low-Earth orbit,

approximately 570 probably taken by the Hubble. The Hubble hasn't been the only space telescope.

There's actually been dozens of space telescopes of many different varieties

which have been launched that observe everything from gamma rays to radio waves.

Before the Hubble was even launched back in 1990,

there were already plans for a successor space telescope.

Throughout the 1990s, astronomers

debated about what the Hubble successor should look like.

At first the plan was to grade a $500 million low-cost telescope.

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