China planning to build space telescope even more powerful than NASA’s Hubble

In a latest announcement, China has said that it is looking forward to come up with a space telescope, even more powerful than NASA’s Hubble, with the capability to observe and capture our universe in extraordinary detail.

The so far anonymous telescope is going to have the ability to dock with the modular space station of China, the Tiangong.

The plans have been announced by Chinese officials during parliamentary sessions. They have claimed that the latest telescope is going to have 300 times the Hubble’s field of vision.

The telescope would be able to dock with a close-by space station, due to which any repairs can be possibly carried out by Chinese taikonauts in no time, in comparison to the huge time of 3.5 years NASA takes to fix issues with the Hubble Space Telescope.

At present, it could very well be the most powerful space telescope in existence, however, there is no clarity over how it does compare to the James Webb Space Telescope, which is the US space agency’s Hubble successor projected for October 2018 launch.

There are not many details because China is notably secretive and has kept the details of their latest technology hidden so that the two pieces of tech can’t be brought into comparison with each other at this point of time. However, until now, it appears that China's telescope will be better than Hubble, but won’t necessarily outperform the JWST.

As per Popular Science, the new telescope will be equipped with ‘2+meter’ mirror, in comparison to Hubble's 2.4-meter mirror and JWST’s segmented 6.5-meter mirror. Right now, the JWST is going to be 100 times more powerful as compared to any other telescope worldwide, including Hubble, but the description of Chinese telescope has been given as of being a more powerful Hubble version.