WASHINGTON, April 24 (UPI) -- The Hubble Space Telescope, operated jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency, is now 16 years old.
Hubble was launched April 24, 1990, aboard the space shuttle Discovery. During its 16 years of operation the telescope has taken roughly 750,000 exposures and probed about 24,000 celestial objects.
During its 16-year lifetime, the telescope has made nearly 93,500 orbits around Earth, totaling nearly 2.4 billion miles -- slightly more than a round trip to Saturn.
The telescope's observations have produced more than 27 terabytes of data, equal to roughly 400,000 compact discs. NASA noted if those compact discs were stacked on top of each other, they would be nearly twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
In all, about 4,000 astronomers from around the world have used the telescope to investigate the universe, publishing more than 6,300 scientific papers stemming from Hubble results.
