Question: how did they invent the hubble telescope

Alex Leide answered on 13 Nov 2019:

Hundreds of years ago, telescopes for looking into space were like you might use yourself. You might have one at school which extends out with some glass lenses. But to look further, you needed bigger glass lenses so these started to get really big. Then scientists invented reflective telescopes which use some curved mirrors to magnify even more. Near cities, light pollution interferes with light coming from space, so these big telescopes were put in the countryside. This is the same way you can see more stars in the countryside than in cities. Also, the earth’s atmosphere absorbs some light, which makes it harder to see light from space, so telescopes were put on top of mountains away from cities and higher in the atmosphere so less light gets absorbed. Once we got to the limit of what you can see from big telescopes on the top of mountains, the next step was a telescope in space! This lets it see much further because there is no atmosphere to block light reaching the telescope. A new, more powerful telescope called the James Webb Space Telescope should be launched in the next couple of years.