Space telescopes · Hubble

Where is the Hubble Space Telescope right now?

The Hubble Space Telescope in orbit above the Earth, drawn from its model in Exo-View

The Hubble Space Telescope has been going round the Earth since April 1990, about 500 km up, once every 95 minutes, at about 7.6 km a second. It is the best-known telescope in history, and it is still working. Exo-View shows where it is over the Earth at this moment and lets you fly beside it.

Fly to Hubble Visit the Webb telescope

Height: About 470 km, slowly sinking
Orbit: About 95 minutes: 15 times a day
Speed: About 7.6 km/s
Tilt of its orbit: 28.5° to the equator
Mirror: 2.4 m across
Mass: About 11,000 kg, the weight of two elephants
Launched: 24 April 1990, on the Space Shuttle Discovery

The telescope that was fixed

Hubble's mirror was ground to the wrong shape and its first pictures were blurred. In 1993 astronauts fitted it with corrective optics, and it became the telescope people remember. Four more shuttle missions, the last in 2009, replaced its cameras and gyroscopes and kept it going. No one can service it now, and it works on a single gyroscope after the others failed, which slows it a little but not its pictures.

What it found

Hubble measured how fast the universe is expanding, helped to show that the expansion is speeding up, and took the Deep Field pictures of thousands of galaxies in a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. It has made over a million observations, and is named for Edwin Hubble, who found that the galaxies are moving apart.

How long it has

Hubble is in low orbit, where the thin upper air drags on it and slowly pulls it down. It is expected to stay up into the 2030s. Its place here is worked out in your browser from its published orbital elements, good to a few kilometres for about two weeks after they are taken, and is approximate.

In Exo-View

The key below switches the Spacecraft layer on and flies to Hubble over the Earth. Its model is drawn larger than life so you can see it, with the Earth beneath. Its plate gives its height, speed and launch date.