NASA's Hubble Marks its 200,000th Orbit by Watching Lensed Supernova

What happened

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope completed its 200,000th orbit around Earth on Sept. NASA's Hubble Marks its 200,000th Orbit by Watching Lensed Supernova By Matthew Williams - October 01, 2026 08:29 PM UTC | Observing On Saturday, September 19th , the Hubble Space Telescope completed its 200,000th orbit of Earth, marking yet another milestone for this venerable observatory. NASA is a space exploration and public company founded in 1958.

19th and marked this milestone with observations that could help refine astronomers' measurements of cosmic expansion (aka. In addition, Hubble has traveled more than 8 billion km (5 billion mi) and gathered more than 1.7 million observations of the Universe.

And earlier this year, Hubble celebrated its thirty-sixth year of continuous service, exceeding the International Space Station by about nine years. The observation it took on the day of its 200,000th orbit was characteristic of the very scientific objective for which Hubble was named: measuring the expansion rate of the Universe - aka. The target of these observations, visible in the upper left corner of the image above, was MACS J0417, a massive galaxy cluster located about 4.65 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus.