The Hubble Space Telescope Circles Earth Every 95 Minutes

The Hubble Space Telescope does not sit still above the Earth. NASA states that Hubble is in low-Earth orbit, making one revolution around Earth every 95 minutes. Its orbital speed is about 17,000 miles per hour, or 27,000 kilometers per hour, at an altitude of approximately 300 miles, or 483 kilometers. The telescope itself is large. NASA describes Hubble as the size of a large school bus, weighing 27,000 pounds, or 12,200 kilograms. Those laps add up. NASA’s figures show more than 195,000 orbits of Earth and more than 5 billion miles travelled. The height is the point of the exercise: from above the atmosphere, NASA says, Hubble gets a clearer and higher resolution view of the cosmos than ground-based observatories.