In its 18 years of viewing the heavens, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has made more than 840,000 observations and snapped more than 540,000 images of 27,000 celestial objects.
Hubble does not travel to stars, planets, and galaxies. It takes pictures of them as it whirls around Earth at 28,000 kilometres an hour.
In its 18-year lifetime, the telescope has made 100,000 trips around our planet. With those trips, Hubble has racked up plenty of frequent-flier miles, about 2.5 billion, which is the equivalent of a round trip to Saturn.
The 18 years’ worth of observations has produced about 32 terabytes of data, equalling the content of about 9,600 digital feature-length films.
Each month the orbiting observatory generates more than 70 gigabytes of data, enough information to fill 70 complete sets of encyclopaedias.
The Hubble archive sends about 2 terabytes of data each month to astronomers throughout the world.
Astronomers using Hubble data have published more than 7,500 scientific papers, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built. In 2007 scientists published more than 700 journal articles on Hubble telescope data.
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