[hnau]

adaptive optics on earthbound telescopes have allowed them to easily surpass hubble's resolution nearly a decade ago. it's also a lot easier to service telescopes on the planet than something orbiting at the ideal L2 point, some 1.5 million km from earth.

[wtvanhest]

This is extremely far from my area of expertise so I am probably wrong, but I imagine that at some point we will advance earth based telescopes to the point where we get diminishing returns when considering atmospheric disturbance.

At that point, it will make more and more sense to launch space based telescopes. But... if we wait until we reach that point in the diminishing returns curve, than we lost valuable innovation time/expertise in space based technology.

My hunch is that if we wanted to get the best telescope tech in any given period of time, we should do both and watch as the two types of technologies converge.

[aptwebapps]

What do you mean by the two types of technology converging?

[andy_ppp]

Launching huge telescopes (and possibly assemble them) into space...?

[wtvanhest]

No, I mean ground based telescope tech and space based tech. Both have different limits and advantages.

[deepsun]

There is at least one space telescope that connects with ground-based telescopes using interferometry, so in some sense, they could be called one telescope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spektr-R

[andy_ppp]

Isn’t it size vs astmopheric noise? Or are there loads of other factors?