This isn't the first time the ESO has shown a love for large captures: it managed to stitch together a massive 9-gigapixel image of the Milky Way out of thousands of photographs taken with its VISTA telescope earlier this fall.
Dubbed the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (or TESS), this new space telescope will one-up Kepler with the ability to perform an all-sky survey (an area 400 times larger than previous missions) to search for transiting exoplanets, with an eye towards planets comparable to Earth in size.
With the launch of the RadioAstron telescope on board a Zenit-2SB rocket this morning, Russia has embarked on the first stage of a plan to create the largest radio telescope yet.
Then there's the replacement for Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which has been very expensive with lots of cost overruns, and now this asteroid mission.