The 5 Most Powerful Telescopes, and 5 That Will Define the Future of Astronomy

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Keck Observatory, began science operations in 1993

Organization: Caltech and the University of California

Location: Mauna Kea, Hawaii

Claim to Fame: On the isolated big island of Hawaii sit Keck's twin telescopes, each 10 meters (about 33 ft) in diameter. When they were built in the early 1990s they became the largest such spans in the world. Keck's advanced adaptive optics paved the way for computer-driven mirrors that can be adjusted multiple times per second to make up for atmospheric disturbances in real time.

Fun Fact: Though the Keck Observatory is more than 15 years old, it has essentially the same design and setup of the more monstrous telescopes under planning or construction, says Caltech's Chuck Steidel, one of the designers of the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope. "Keck Observatory is the prototype of the next generation," he told PM.

Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990

Organization: NASA and the European Space Agency

Location: Orbiting the Earth

Claim to Fame: By capturing iconic images such as the deep field, Crab Nebula and Eagle Nebula, Hubble has become the world's most famous telescope. The final space shuttle mission to Hubble has encountered multiple delays, but now is planned to launch in May. It will upgrade the telescope with enough new gear to keep it running and viable into 2020, until its successor is ready for the stage.

Fun Fact: At 20 years old, Hubble runs on some old-school computing technology, including a relatively ancient Intel 486 processor. Hubble is one of NASA's four "great observatories"—the others include the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope and Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.

Spitzer Space Telescope, launched in 2003

Organization: NASA, JPL and Caltech

Location: Following the Earth around the sun

Claim to Fame: Spitzer is the last of NASA's four great observatories in space. But unlike its older sibling, Hubble, which images mostly in visible light, Spitzer looks in infrared. So the telescope not only sees at a frequency that we can't, it does so while trailing the Earth at about 0.1 AU (1 astronomical unit is the mean distance between the Earth and sun, or about 92,956,000 miles), thus free from atmospheric distortion.

Fun Fact: Spitzer first spied the evidence of "hot Jupiters"—gas giants exoplanets roasting on one side and cool on the other. And though facing its impending demise, Spitzer isn't through yet. NASA estimated in 2007 that the telescope would exhaust its onboard helium supply this April, but in August the Spitzer team compiled this stunning image of multiple generations of star formation.

Large Binocular Telescope, first light in October 2005

Organization: U.S., Japan and Germany collaboration

Location: Mount Graham, southeastern Arizona

Claim to Fame: The Large Binocular Telescope shows that two lenses are better than one. The LBT's two 8.4-meter (about 28-ft) spans work together to provide as much resolution as would be derived from a single 11.8-meter mirror, and are 10 times more powerful than Hubble's.

Fun Fact: This lonely mountaintop is a great place for undisturbed viewing, but the observatory's location has proven problematic for other reasons. Environmentalists wanted the site moved to protect the peak's native red squirrels. Some Native Americans from the Apache tribe opposed the telescope, saying that Mount Graham was a sacred cultural site for them. And in both 1996 and 2004, wildfires raged dangerously close to the observatory, but left it unscathed.

Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, launched in 2008

Organization: NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Sweden

Location: Low Earth orbit

Claim to Fame: It measures the most powerful radiation in the universe. Supermassive black holes, the collisions of neutron stars and some supernovae produce bursts of gamma rays that carry far more energy than anything possible on Earth. Thankfully, the Earth's atmosphere shields us from this cosmic barrage, so any telescope seeking to measure gamma rays must do so from orbit.

Fun Fact: Even NASA was not a fan of this mouthful of a name. The mission was formerly called the Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope (and dubbed with the gruff acronym GLAST), until NASA asked for suggestions that better captured the telescope's mission to investigate some of the universe's strangest phenomena. They eventually renamed the telescope after 20th-century physicist Enrico Fermi, and have taken to calling it simply "Fermi."

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