NASA Just Announced A New Space Telescope That Makes The Hubble Look Like A Frickin’ Chump

Outside of the time Elijah Craig decided to char the inside of his oak barrels before filling them with distilled sour mash, there hasn’t been a greater human invention than the Hubble Telescope.

The Hubble, the greatest telescope in the history of mankind, has opened up the cosmos to us in ways chumps like Tycho Brahe and Galileo Galilei could never even imagine.

It’s peered at distance galaxies, gazed into nebulas, and stared almost back to the creation of time.

Fucking dope, right?

Well, move over you, pussy, because NASA is set to launch a telescope that has 100 times the field of vision of Hubble. Check out this comparison.

That rinky dink dick square at the top left is Hubble. The whole picture? WFIRST. The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. It’s basically gonna figure out everything we need to know. From NASA’s release.

After years of preparatory studies, NASA is formally starting an astrophysics mission designed to help unlock the secrets of the universe — the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST).

With a view 100 times bigger than that of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, WFIRST will aid researchers in their efforts to unravel the secrets of dark energy and dark matter, and explore the evolution of the cosmos. It also will discover new worlds outside our solar system and advance the search for worlds that could be suitable for life.

“WFIRST has the potential to open our eyes to the wonders of the universe, much the same way Hubble has,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at Headquarters in Washington. “This mission uniquely combines the ability to discover and characterize planets beyond our own solar system with the sensitivity and optics to look wide and deep into the universe in a quest to unravel the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter.”

Heck yea, bros. It’s gonna look at shit we can’t even yet comprehend yet.

Employing multiple techniques, astronomers also will use WFIRST to track how dark energy and dark matter have affected the evolution of our universe. Dark energy is a mysterious, negative pressure that has been speeding up the expansion of the universe. Dark matter is invisible material that makes up most of the matter in our universe.

It is set to launch in the mid-2020s. Combine that with the James Webb Telescope, the biggest telescope ever made, which will launch in October 2018 and look at the first stars ever formed, and we should have this whole universe thing figured out by like 2030.

Suck our dicks, space.

[Via NASA]