The Hubble Space Telescope finished its 200,000th trip around Earth on 19 September, NASA reports. The observatory has now been in orbit for 36 years.
Over that time, Hubble has covered more than 5 billion miles (about 8 billion kilometres) and carried out more than 1.7 million observations. Its data has changed how astronomers understand the universe in many ways.
NASA says Hubble spent the milestone day looking for a gravitationally lensed supernova. In this effect, a massive foreground object bends and magnifies light from an exploding star far behind it. That can make very distant stellar explosions bright enough to study, and sometimes shows the same explosion more than once.
