Since 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has orbited just above Earth’s atmosphere to get a clear view deep into the universe. Hubble remains one of NASA’s most successful and long-lasting missions, and continues to shed light on astronomy’s greatest mysteries.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is NASA’s infrared flagship observatory. JWST is an international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

Following on the technical and scientific legacy of previous optical and infrared space observatories, such as the Hubble, Spitzer and Herschel, JWST offers orders of magnitude improvements in sensitivity and spatial resolution from 0.6 to 28.8 micron, enabling transformative research in a broad range of science areas, including the solar system, exoplanets, star- and planet-formation, galactic science, galaxy formation and evolution, and cosmology.

The NEOWISE mission searches for asteroids and comets using a space telescope. Launched in 2009 as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the space telescope was originally designed to survey the sky in infrared. After completing its original mission in 2011, it was brought back online and repurposed for the NEOWISE project in 2013.

As a Boeing 747-SP aircraft modified to accommodate a 2.5 meter gyro-stabilized telescope, SOFIA is the largest airborne observatory in the world.

As the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope, Chandra has eight-times greater resolution and can detect sources over 20-times fainter than previous X-ray telescopes. The Chandra X-Ray Telescope launched into orbit in 1999.

Launched in 2008, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope observes the universe using the highest-energy form of light. Fermi serves as a window to extreme phenomena in our universe, like gamma-ray bursts, black-hole jets, and supernova remnants.

Since 2004, the Swift Observatory has investigated gamma-ray bursts. Swift relays the locations of these bursts to ground stations, which allows ground-based and space-based telescopes to observe the afterglow.

TESS is an all-sky survey mission launched in 2018 that is dedicated to discovering exoplanets around nearby bright stars.

This satellite is a European Space Agency mission that studies the universe with different kinds of light. To date, XMM-Newton has studied over half a million X-ray sources.