01-17-2004, 07:07 AM
I just watched a recently made program on Hubble. At the end they talked about the work on the next generation space telescope. The size would be 3-4 times larger than Hubble and it would be a superconductor based IR spectrum detector only. The plan is to put the thing at a lagrange point between the earth and the sun, which is way beyond the moon. This is a point of gravitational stability which should require very little work to keep in position. The lagrange point is also desirable because both the earth and the sun block little of the sky from that point.