Why do space-based optical telescopes capture clearer images than ground-based optical telescopes?

Space-based optical telescopes capture clearer images than ground-based ones primarily because they are above Earth's atmosphere. The atmosphere distorts light through turbulence, which limits the practical resolution of ground-based telescopes to about one arc second. This atmospheric distortion is known as "seeing".123

Space telescopes avoid these atmospheric effects, allowing them to achieve much higher resolution and capture finer details. For example, the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, has a 2.4-meter primary mirror and was designed to see into a volume of space significantly larger than what ground-based systems could achieve at the time. While ground-based telescopes can use adaptive optics to mitigate some atmospheric distortions, space telescopes offer a clearer view by bypassing the atmosphere entirely.134