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Observatories in Space

Space observatories are having major impacts on our knowledge of the Universe, from the Solar neighborhood to the cosmological background, opening many new windows out of reach to ground-based observatories. Celestial objects emit all over the electromagnetic spectrum, and the Earth's atmosphere blocks a large part of them. Moreover, space offers a very stable environment from where the whole sky can be observed with no (or very little) perturbations, providing new observing possibilities. This chapter presents a few striking examples of astrophysics space observatories and of major results spanning from the Solar neighborhood and our Galaxy to external galaxies, quasars and the cosmological background.