
The observatory has been faithfully circling Earth for over 18 years since its April 1990 launch, offering us Earthlings glimpses of the cosmos as we've never had before.
Now, after travelling around Earth at nearly five miles per second for 100,000 orbits, Hubble's odometer reads about 2.72 billion miles — that's roughly 5,700 round trips to the Moon and only 0.000462693 Light years. To mark the event, scientists turned Hubble's camera eye toward part of a nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074, which is about 170,000 light-years from Earth near the Tarantula nebula.
