system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If space based telescopes cant see planets how will the earth based European Extremely Large Telescope do it?

I thought hubble was orders of magnitude better because our atmosphere gets in the way when looking at those kinds of resolutions. Would the same technology work much better in space?
gpt
By being much much bigger. The big advantage of space telescopes is no atmosphere, meaning no seeing (the twinkling of stars) and no atmospheric absorption of light. The big disadvantage is price and size - it is extremely expensive to launch a space telescope, they can only be a few meters across.

Land based telescopes on the other hand can easily be made enormous. We have adaptive optics and other systems nowadays to compensate for seeing. This allows us to negate many of the problems of the atmosphere and use enormous land telescopes.