What is the advantage to the hubble Space station telescope's postion in space rather than being on earth?

Answer 1

It's well up above the atmosphere!

That means that one doesn't have atmospheric absorption of wavelengths that can't reach earth's surface, or refraction distorting and blurring the images that otherewise do reach earth's surface, or scattering of light generally into the telescope, which even happens at night with surface-based based observations.

All of this means that one can observe a much LARGER RANGE of WAVELENGTHS in the broadly "anti-Sun" direction ALL THE TIME, with MUCH BETTER ACCURACY --- a TRIPLE ADVANTAGE!

On Earth the best "seeing," that is the inescapable minimum sixe of originally point-source light, is found at observatories specially placed at certain mountain-top sites noted for having the least thick and "most stable" atmospheric condition. Thus it's atmosphere-limited. That best seeing is on the order of 0.5 arc-seconds. (But they can't do optical observations during the day-time, in other words when the Sun is "in the sky.")

In contrast, the seeing with the Hubble Telescope is at the theoretical "diffraction limit" given by the diameter of its mirror and the particular wavelength of the light. That works out to a few hundredths of an arc second. (The position of the centre of this "point-spread" can be measure to a much finer accuracy.)

Live long and prosper.

Answer 2

Hi:

It away from the atmospheric distortion cause by the uneven heating and cooling of the air in the atmosphere. Have you ever seen a hot road or seen picture of the Noon day desert? You notice the distorting or bending of the objects in the background the same thing happen in the atmosphere and the star is a point of light , it will look it twinkling because of this effect. This is fine as long as your not trying to take a picture of it for research propose ( because astronomers need long exposure time to record on film or CCD devices to get the image of the star or other astronomical object) but if the light keeping blinking or appearing to change position this is hard to do, But by placing your telescope out in space you eliminated the problem and you can see father out in space than you can on Earth. Go to the Nasa website:

http://www.nasa.gov - type Hubble telescope in the search box

They will explain all this to you.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

The atmosphere of earth really screws up light coming in. Since the hubble telescope (it's not a space station, it's a satellite) is outside of the atmosphere, it doesn't have to deal with that.

Answer 4

with the Hubble space telescope you can get very sharp images compared to the ones on taken by telescopes on the ground because the earth's atmosphere distorts light coming from cosmic objects.

Answer 5

You don' t have to put up with the atmosphere. Thet means no turbulaence, no absorption of certain wavelengths of light and no bright sky so you can observe for 24 hours in a day.

Answer 6

Just like the others said-
Since earths atmosphere tends to bend and difract light it is much harder to get the best detail of that object. Also in space there is no weather-you can view anything you want, anytime.

Answer 7

U don't have the earth's atmosphere to look through ,so u eliminate all that distortion.

Answer 8

The first three have the main reason. Lack of light pollution is also a plus.