Science ACE report on the telescope

This is another assignment I did for the purpose of gaining ACE points - I did this report on the telescope. 

Enjoy!

The telescope is an instrument widely used by many people of different professions, from sailors to astronomers. Telescopes are crucial tools in the jobs of these people; their main purpose is to observe remote objects which are far away from the user or not even visible to the user at all.

The word telescope has its origins in Greek; it is a combination of the words tele,  (tele, meaning “far”) and skopein (skopein, meaning “to see”). In the Greek language, the word telescope literally translates as “far-seeing”. This word was coined by the Greek mathematician Giovanni Demisiani, as a name for one of Galileo Galilei’s magnifying instruments.

The invention of the telescope dates back to 1608, in the Netherlands, when Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Janssen, spectacle makers from Middelburg, created telescopes based on the theory of refraction. 

 Today, modern telescopes include radio telescopes, which make use of radio waves to create images; X-ray and Gamma ray telescopes, which utilise X-ray optics to perceive images of subjects; and the Hubble Space Telescope, which is a large Cassegrain reflector telescope that has been orbiting the Earth since 1990, and has secured its reputation as one of NASA’s most successful missions ever.

 Hubble is expected to last until 2014, and then it will crash back to Earth. In 2018, it will be succeeded by the James Webb Space Telescope, a powerful infrared telescope which has only one main purpose: to see far into the deep recesses of the universe and uncover more secrets in the dark void.

Thus concludes my report, which covers the origins of the telescope, to the great telescopes in space which we operate and utilise to their full potential today.

Of course, this is not the whole report; it is actually much longer, and has images, like the one above.

More to come soon!