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Notable space-based telescopes include the Hubble Telescope, which "sees" from the infrared, through the visible, to the ultraviolet frequencies of light, the Chandra Observatory, which "sees" x-ray frequencies, and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which looks for variations in the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Additionally, turbulence in Earth's atmosphere can cause blurring of images that can otherwise be viewed perfectly by Earth-bound telescopes, a problem that spaced-based telescopes obviously don't have.
Earth's atmosphere is opaque to critical light "types", or frequency ranges, so these light "types" must be observed from space. Click on the image to the left to see which light "types" get through Earth's atmosphere, and which don't.
Starting with the venerable Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, astronomers have increasingly turned to space-based telescopes to avoid the viewing problems presented by the Earth's atmosphere.
Space-based telescopes can orbit the Earth, or orbit so-called Lagrange points associated with Earth. Lagrange points are relatively stable "gravitational wells" of the Earth-Sun system. For example, Hubble orbits the Earth, whereas WMAP orbits the Lagrange point "L2".
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