NASA's new 'WFIRST' space telescope sees 100x more than Hubble can

Up until now, the Hubble Space Telescope was the one that was looking to the utter edges of the universe, taking a few photos and blowing the world away each time. Well, NASA could retire Hubble very soon with its new WFIRST telescope.

The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (or WFIRST) has a field of view 100x larger than Hubble, and it's designed to block the glare from individual stars, which will make NASA's job of finding the chemical makeup of exoplanets easier. NASA won't launch WFIRST until the mid-2020s, so we should see the James Webb telescope that will be finished in 2018 be the champion until at around 2025 or so.

Once NASA has WFIRST online, it will provide a view of space that we've never seen before. NASA should be better capable of understanding the shape of the universe, as well as provide the US space agency with more insight into how dark energy and dark matter work, which could solve some very big problems and mysteries we have here on Earth.

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