Ground-based

Much as a large animal like a lion produces a deeper roar than a tiny mouse's squeak, merging supermassive black holes create lower-frequency gravitational waves than the relatively small black holes LIGO and similar ground-based experiments can detect.

The new technology in these super telescopes will produce images 10 times sharper than those from the Hubble, even though they are ground-based.

Operating above Earth, free from the blurring and filtering effects of our planet’s atmosphere, Hubble can resolve astronomical objects ten to twenty times better than typically possible with large ground-based telescopes.

In 1998, astronomers measured how fast the universe is expanding by using ground-based telescopes to study relatively nearby exploding stars, called supernovae.

Although ground-based telescopes are getting better all the time, Livio says there are still advantages to putting a telescope in space, out beyond the distorting and filtering effects of Earth's atmosphere.

The panel’s other recommendations include building new highly sensitive equipment, creating new ways for multidisciplinary teams all over the world to collaborate on various aspects of the project, and forming a profitable investor program to further laboratory, ground-based and theoretical telescopic research.