With only limited yaw control and no articulation of any kind I was frankly surprised that it was able to see DART at all.
It has to be really cold to do this, hence the big complicated heat shield.
Infrared let’s us see things that are further away, because when something’s really far away it gets red-shifted down out of the visible spectrum into the infrared (due to expansion of the universe).
So it’s not really any better at imaging things that are close / in the visible spectrum like Jupiter.
Where it excels at is, first looking at wave lengths so far invisible by any larger telescope. Hubble can't observe at those wave lengths and they are virtually invisible from earth, as the atmosphere basically absorbs any light at those wave lengths.
Also, it has almost 10x as much surface area than Hubble. So it will collect vastly more light than Hubble, as can be seen by the deep sky pictures available so far, taken in a fraction of time compared similar Hubble pictures.
The limited targetting control doesn't matter from a scientific perspective. There is a many years long waiting list for observations. During a year, the telescope is able to hit every spot on the sky, so the observations are just done in the order given by the telescope.
> Hubble can't observe at those wave lengths and they are virtually invisible from earth
coughs in Spitzer
> The limited targetting control doesn't matter from a scientific perspective.
I would argue that it does matter in the case of specific events like the DART impact. Having it in its field of view was either extensive planning or dumb luck. I really don't see how it was too complicated to add one pitch servo, hell having a full robotic arm is even planned for LUVIOR.
Maybe they'll figure out a way to translate the colours better for consumption.