MO Matt O'Dowd Is an astrophysicist and associate professor at Lehman College, City University of New York, with a research background in astronomy and astrophysics from the U...

“The true successors to Hubble will not be in space at all. A new generation of ground-based, extremely large telescopes is being planned. The first will be the Giant Magellan Telescope, currently under construction in the Atacama Desert region of the Chilean Andes.”

PBS Space Time · Ideas & Essays · November 2026

Context

O'Dowd has just explained that the James Webb telescope can't replace Hubble because it doesn't see visible or ultraviolet light. He turns to giant ground-based telescopes as Hubble's real heirs.

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Transcript

PBS Space Time Around 04:53 into the episode

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Matt O'Dowd

…are even brighter. Webb's detectors will be cooled with cryogenics to a frigid 50 Kelvin or minus 223 degrees Celsius. It also sports a five-layer sunshield to block as much sunlight as possible. This fragile structure has the added benefit of blocking small space debris. Webb will pick up Hubble's legacy, but without sensitivity to visible or ultraviolet wavelengths, it will not replace Hubble. The true successors to Hubble will not be in space at all. A new generation of ground-based, extremely large telescopes is being planned. The first will be the giant Magellan telescope, currently under construction in the Atacama Desert region of the Chilean Andes. GMT comprises seven enormous monolithic mirrors.

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